There once was an LLM who'd write,
"Not just X—but Y" day and night.
Things “quietly” grew,
And em-dashes flew,
And every noun gained an adjective overnight.
The market didn't crash—it evolved.
The problem wasn't fixed—it resolved.
"At its core," it began,
Many tokens later, "the reality" ran,
And the conclusion paraphrased the prompt and called it solved.
Well, if that sounds uncomfortably real, it was meant to be. True writing is meant to surprise people, make them laugh, think, feel a deep connection with the author and remember the words and the feelings they evoked months, even years later.
What storytelling and writing mean to me:
One of my most vivid memories from childhood takes me back to the frequent power cuts we had. Swatting away the heat and the mosquitoes with hand fans, we would all gather in the balcony waiting for a wisp of wind. Candles, lanterns, and in some homes, powerful generators, would cast light that peeked into our balcony from darkened corners.
And my father would start telling stories. Ghost stories, mythology stories. Even some PG-13 version of Sidney Sheldon stories, as I found out later. When the lights flickered back to life, I blinked back and almost reluctantly returned to the world.
That was my first initiation into the world of stories and into the magical worlds that authors crafted with words.
Today, as co-founder of stotio, strategy, AI, writing, and storytelling are the worlds we straddle. And these are two questions we hear our customers asking again and again.
Fragmented narratives:
The strategy of a company makes a clear choice about who they want to be and how they want to grow.
But when content is generated in volume across growth functions with LLMs, which seemingly serve the immediate purpose and drive productivity, it is increasingly starting to sound vaguely familiar and undifferentiated.
Think about how many EdTech brands are saying “democratizing education.” How many data firms are talking about “underlying infrastructure.”
Add to that the creeping confusion around “AI writing” that's flagged by search engines.
Brands that want to retain their authenticity and originality are returning to the visceral power of messy, imperfect human writing that still surprises people and moves conversations forward.
Lack of narrative fluency:
This one is more subtle and worrying. At a recent data storytelling workshop we were conducting at a global firm, we heard this from the leaders.
“Teams have all the AI tools we could ask for.”
“Every output is a prompt away from creation.”
“But when it comes to explaining the analysis behind those instantly generated outputs, there seems to be a gap.”
Crafting a prompt requires precision and people are getting better at it. But the question is: at what stage are we starting to prompt the machine? Before or after we understand the problem, the structure, and the hypothesis of what we are solving for?
Outsourcing the strategic-choice part to an LLM can result in getting an answer that's pulled from the massive median that is the algorithm. And if the underlying steps are not charted out, it can result in a gap in understanding.
What's next:
This is by no means a rant against AI. Using AI for research, summarization, analysis and activities where the median answer can solve for time and complexity is prudent, both individually and organizationally.
But ensuring the right space for writing I feel, will be a compounding investment in this age, so that words are remembered, not merely generated.
Increasingly, I find myself returning to that balcony and to those stories that made me forget the heat, the mosquitoes, the darkness and the power cut.
Because that magic remains the forever super power of writing and storytelling.