Humans have always been fascinated with rainbows, yet these days it seems AI rainbows are uniquely alluring. Rainbows lead to that magical pot of gold, right? Even as an adult, I can’t help but see a rainbow and muse over treasure at the end. It is one of those stories that can get so ingrained in a culture, that it almost runs as a subroutine in our brains.

Like when your palm itches and you think about money. Or you hesitate and walk around a ladder instead of under it. The way you might flinch when cracking a mirror. Seven years of bad luck.

While these might be silly superstitions, we’d be naive to believe we’re immune from their influence…or the childlike hope of easy treasure.

We have been down this path before many times with different rainbows: the internet, websites, social media, Facebook fan pages, self-publishing, etc. We’re not immune to the lure of easy treasure…and right now, the shiniest rainbow is labeled “AI”.

The “AI Rainbows” Distraction

Might as well begin with pointing out the ugly truth. To be really excellent at any skill, one has to suffer. We humans, deep down, don’t respect what took nothing to learn, create, or do.

It reminds me of a debate I was having with Spawn (teenage son) about the movie The Matrix. All of us were wowed at the superhuman feats one could “learn” in that movie with just a flash drive plugged into your HEAD. Need to know Kung Fu? Don’t have a couple decades to haul water up the stairs to some monastery while the master hits you with sticks?

No problem. Let’s just give this a download….

I extended the logic with Spawn, though. While this idea of “instant skill” might be novel and exciting initially, what it steals is far more insidious. What if tomorrow, I could download how to play masterful piano? Who really would want to listen to me play? Or come to a concert? Buy my music? Seems to me they’d all be busy pushing their own new and shiny skills in similar fashion.

For a while.

Then it would all feel hollow, empty, cheap, and a lot like…cheating.

How long would I stick to playing piano? What takes nothing to “master” also takes nothing to “dismiss.” How quickly would I grow bored with my new and “perfect” piano skills?

***The same skills everyone else with that “piano mastery brain download” have, too.

It took me years of reading, writing, learning, practicing, sacrificing and showing up day after day even when I didn’t feel like it to hone my skills. Yes, AI can outline faster, organize faster, can even WRITE FOR ME! But why would I do that? Unused muscles either never develop or, if developed, will atrophy from disuse.

The AI rainbow is alluring but so were the sirens’ songs, and where, exactly was that song leading those sailors?

AI Rainbows & Fool’s Gold Fallacy

I have personally witnessed a MASSIVE shift in the quality of writing in the past ten years. With all the digital tools rainbows we have, the easy access to research, spell check, and grammar check, one should expect overall quality to improve. Yet, we are seeing the opposite. Unwatchable movies, unreadable books, soulless art, music without that human spark.

Do we need to mention the McDonald’s Christmas commercial that used ONLY AI? Yes, yes we do.

I’ll admit the Digital Age has been to blame for feeding this monster, especially once social media became such a cornerstone for relevance and market advantage. The relentless demand for more content, fresh content, relevant content to “captivate” audiences has chained many creatives to Hell’s Treadmill.

Companies are falling for this as well, which is why they’re leaning far too heavily on AI. AI can be controlled, monitored and writers become interchangeable pieces on a Monopoly board. Easy to plug in, duplicate and keep on a leash. Same for all creatives. Writers are picky, actors are divas, and artists are moody. Most inconveniently?

They expect to actually be PAID for what they do.

*clutching pearls*

Thus, in another staggering move to “increase profits” and “save money” companies are increasingly outsourcing to AI generated content. Content that is supposed to be bold, edgy, creative, compelling…and just happens to look, sound and feel just as “unique” as all the other “unique” content.

When everyone is special, then no one is, which was the point we explored in the last post, Counterfeit Creativity: The High Cost of Cheap Art.

Writers Who Know How to MINE

Mining is a mixture of skill, courage, tenacity, wisdom, and flat out insanity. It is a lot of tedium, toil, work, and thankless pain. Writing, like mining for anything, requires patience, endurance, innovation, and passion. But, last I checked, those weren’t for SALE.

Yet, what do we know about all “gold rushes”? Who gets rich? The ones wielding shovels or those selling shovels? Prospectors rarely struck it rich. Winners sold to the miners. BIG WINNERS (snakes) sold to those who liked the idea of being rich more than the work involved.

Whether it was reselling spent plots, phony maps, or sure-fire tricks to STRIKE IT RICH, it didn’t matter. There was always a naive/gullible market ready to throw their own gold down to skip the hard parts…and a snake to take their money.

It’s human nature.

Fast-forward to today, and AI companies, prompt gurus, “millionaire author” courses, content mills, “authentic human author” certifications. They’re the shovel-sellers. They profit off the rush without digging themselves.

But here’s where the metaphor flips in our favor. In every gold rush, a few stubborn diggers hit pay dirt. Over time, tests and failures, they eventually became experts at terrain and geology. Skilled prospectors learned invaluable tells that could lead to larger, richer strikes.

They learned to spot “tells” (signs in the geology/terrain like quartz veins, color changes in soil, or river bends that trap gold). Writers—masterful writers—do something similar. We notice the patterns, the trauma, the unevenness and how that all guides the way to the REAL story.

In my opinion, AI’s fixation on “perfect” is one of the biggest flaws in the system. Humans are messy, ugly, irrational, emotional, unpredictable and illogical, which—ironically—are all the ingredients of AMAZING WRITING!

AI is the CZ of our time. Flawless! Perfect! But still just a fancy piece of glass.

All Writers Should Be Wary of AI Rainbows

We have seen this play out time and time again. Whenever we invent a tool to make something better, faster, cheaper, easier, there is always, always a cost. We have film students in COLLEGE who cannot sit through a full-length movie, writers who never read, and Amazon and the internet is drowning us in AI slop.

Why?

Again, humans will always choose novelty and the path of least resistance (at least for a while).

Did spellcheck make a generation of better spellers? Nope. It masked errors so well that many never internalized rules—kids lean on it, brains skip the muscle-building, and we end up with adults who can’t spell.

Did grammar check transform us all into a society that understood the complexities of sentence structure and subject-verb agreement? Hardly. It fixes surface stuff on the fly, but deep grammar knowledge? The knowledge that allows a writer to wield grammar as another tool is something only a LOT of reading, studying and practice can train.

POV is an incredible tool. Why choose first-person, or third or even second? What emotional effect are we going for? In Caroline Kepnes’ You, she selected second-person POV which is almost never used…ever. Yet, when placed in a story told from the stalker’s perspective? Chilling.

T. Jefferson Parker broke with tradition and told the antagonist’s POV through first-person and Charlie Hood’s (the investigator) in third. Why? Because Jeff wanted the reader to bond emotionally with the antagonist to demonstrate the emotional complexity of the topic. There is no clean black and white and good and bad. Just messy, flawed humans doing the best the can when the deck is stacked against them.

That’s the magic AI can’t replicate. It can spit out “correct” prose, but it can’t feel the weight of those choices. It can’t draw from lived chaos to make a story resonate. The cost of chasing “perfect” shortcuts? We lose the very mess that makes writing human—and worth reading.

Keep Those Mining Skills Sharp

Tools in and of themselves can only do so much. Slight tangent but makes my point. I used to LOVE watching home improvement shows that demonstrated ways to decorate for super cheap. Initially, I was mesmerized. They did ALL THAT for under $1000! Then I realized it was a thousand dollars in supplies.

That money didn’t cover the saws, drills, guns, welds OR the SKILL to use any of those. When one hires a contractor, we aren’t hiring the table saw, rather the artisan who can use that saw masterfully. I mean I can use a table saw. Can watch a video. Most have guards that will mostly keep my fingers in tact…but I have zero skills.

I am far more likely to make a mess massacre than a masterpiece.

Same in writing.

While AI rainbows are pretty, what they lead to? Not all that glitters is gold.

Right now? I feel we are living this meme from Fight Club. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Remember, earlier I stated that humans initially love novelty and convenience? That love wears thin super quick and the shine is already dimming.

There are no shortcuts and we’d all be wise to just leave the AI rainbows where they belong…on Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers.

What are YOUR Thoughts on AI Rainbows?

I know today is St. Patrick’s and we all want a bit of luck, but luck alone has never been enough without the skills to take advantage of opportunity.

How do you feel about what AI is doing to us skill-wise? Are new writers failing to mature and dig deeper because of the quick thrill of “perfectly packaged prose”? If they are “training” on recycled content, how valuable is the training? Are the younger generations of content creators driven by a desire to create meaningful art and expression or the need for a quick dopamine fix?

Is AI unwittingly eroding the very character traits necessary for great artists (Eg. tenacity)?

For writers who have been here more than a minute, are you concerned that your skills will erode? Do you find yourself constantly second-guessing skills you’ve used for years? Or does that compel you to train even harder to stand apart from the crowd?

For a profession that seems to UNIQUELY SUFFER from Imposter Syndrome, do you think AI only makes this feeling worse? It was bad when everyone assumed every published author was self-published, but at least they didn’t think a ROBOT wrote it. How does this make you feel? The shift of bad writing must be human and good writing must be AI.

I’d like your thoughts!

The post Chasing AI Rainbows & Fool’s Gold: Real Writers Know How to DIG appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

AI is the new buzzword. Everything is AI, has AI, offers AI. To be blunt, AI is not the problem. People believing the tool can replace the work is the problem.

Yes, I have been quieter on here far longer than usual. Not gone, just down and dirty in the trenches doing postgraduate work in AI/Machine Learning because y’all matter the world to me. You deserve more than an opinion piece.

For those who might be new to this blog, writers and tech are my jam. The “new shiny” is always something to be wary of. That was true with Web 1.0 and websites, Web 2.0 and social media, Web 3.0 and algorithmic alchemy, and it is truer now than ever in human history.

AI enters the chat.

In 2014, I introduced the concept of the SWOT analysis with 3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Writing & Increase Sales. Back then, the new tech shiny happened to be social media and algorithmic alchemy. Again, the tools evolve. If we want to remain in the game, stagnation equals death. What I said in 2014 is still relevant today, and we are all going to address the AI generated elephant in the room.

The AI Bubble is Already Here

I’ve been around since companies were tossing billions at anything with dot com at the end. I wrote very literally the first books on social media and branding back when writers were throwing holy water at email and snail-mailing agents.

Suffice to say, not my first rodeo.

Today, we are going to do a quick and dirty SWOT analysis because I want you to remember you matter, people matter and human voices matter.

I didn’t jump head first into AI commentary because I wanted to see how the pieces moved, how the machines “thought” and where we could spot and exploit the blind spots.

Because there are always, and I mean always blind spots.

SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

Strengths. AI is an incredible tool for those who use it wisely. It can compress research time we might have once lost in a library, then later on Google. Using ChatGPT or Grok or Gemini or whatever can help us sort through sticky ideas and find our core through lines. This can save time, revisions, and stop us from spending months or—God forbid—years on a WIP that has no spine.

Weaknesses. If we fail to understand core AI concepts like hallucination, model confabulation, synthetic error, false interference, unverified synthesis, we can unwittingly train our chatbot to sign off on some really, and I mean really bad ideas.

Opportunities. Again, AI as a tool can cut down on time we spend chasing our tails. Additionally, AI can help us shoestring or outsource tech that we have to “know” to do this work on a professional level in a way that is incredibly cost-effective. For instance, need a basic website? When I started out, a basic website was outside of the scope of most people’s abilities. One had to drop five grand or more on just a simple web page that told the world we were actually being serious.

Threats. Mistaking the tool for the artisan who wields the tool.

Even the Big Wigs at Davos See This

Follow along the speeches at the WEF and the cracks are already showing. Many thought leaders pushing AI still cannot seem to make good on all the promises. And, personally, I am happy they’re admitting this.

AI can give the illusion of replacing real jobs—writers—but that is all it is.

An illusion.

Go hang around on LinkedIn and feeds are crammed with beautifully crafted posts that look great at a glance. But that is the problem. Beyond the glance, the reality is far more troubling. Yes, maybe social media posts before were ugly. Too many folks who misused your and you’re and goofed up there/their/they’re. But at least back then, despite the grammatical ugliness and typos, posts still had a human beating heart.

To quote The Incredibles, “When everyone is special, no one is.”

Social media sites have recently added AI as a feature so people could feel confident they were saying something thought-provoking and brilliant. Maybe we fell for it…for a while. It hit us (writers particularly) in the confidence because masterfully crafted sentences and proper usage of em dashes and colons once helped US stand apart.

Now? Everyone using an em dash properly has to prove they aren’t a bot.

No, the irony is not lost on me.

We have fallen into the AI Uncanny Valley where we wonder who and what is real. Who can we trust? Which people are doing the real thinking versus who’s offloading all their brainpower and human ingenuity? That is what we are going to drill into today.

Landman, Wildcatting & What Creatives Do BEST

For those who have yet to inhale watch the Paramount series Landman, no spoiler alerts. The irony of this wildly successful story is merely an illustration of exactly why AI cannot and will not replace authentic creativity.

All industries have blind spots. Multinational oil companies mistake decades of what they think they know while dismissing rule-breakers; entertainment does the same by churning out predictable, forgettable stories using outdated ideas of what “works.”

Landman is proof of concept. Audiences want great stories. They are wholesale rejecting formulas, especially formulas where investors and boardrooms hold more sway than the audience.

Maybe the reason Landman landed so hard with me (pardon the pun) is writers are wildcatters. We learn the emotional topography then drill. We pressure test, see what hits. What is a leak? When is a leak a sign we need to go deeper? How can we parlay that experiential intuition we know in our bones into a gusher?

When do we stop drilling and move on because the terrain is tapped out?

Many of us traipse off into the wilderness of story, trekking past the bones of countless who tried to strike it rich before us with only a dream, our instincts, and a stubbornness that can often look like madness.

AI cannot and will never replace that.

How many of you decided to become writers because you LOVE books? Back in the day, you queried agent after agent hoping someone would invest and kept at it despite rejection? Then with social media. How many of you risked everything starting a blog? Trying? Failing? Reinventing? How many of you self-published went indie or hybrid?

You, my lovely wildcatters, are the pioneers with a dream and the unconquerable spirit.

But let’s all be honest here. Maybe some of you never used AI or refuse to. Fair enough. Perhaps you’re in love with AI. Wonderful! Again, it can be a great tool. Yet, as I mentioned, the world has been drifting into a place that doesn’t need anymore drilling.

AI UNCANNY VALLEY is DRY

It might not all be “dry” but it’s either pumping out the predictable or it’s being worked over when it long ago needed to be ditched. Differentiation is the key, but this is where we need to reverse the mantra I’ve hammered for years.

Instead of working smarter not harder? It might just be time to also work harder not just smarter.

Just because Uncanny Valley is dry in no way means humans no longer yearn for great stories. The point is creative professionals might just have to go Old School to dominate the Brave New World.

Just like in the series, Landman, it is the person dismissed by “those who know” who often demonstrate exactly how much the power brokers are blind to.

AI is fabulous for optimizing, but that is the danger. It can over optimize exhausted terrain. This is where your instincts—instincts no machine can replicate—are going to be golden. While LLMs (large language models) can synthesize a human experience, they cannot replace them. They can’t translate humanity the way you can.

Many of us have been reading since we were children. We are the product of decades of novels, encyclopedias, lived experiences and we must get back to WHY PEOPLE LOVE WRITERS (Code for stories).

We see what non-writers cannot.

When we write stories about families, love, loss, murder, heartache, death, redemption there is a visceral nature to it that only other humans can recognize. Almost every human being has been in love, been betrayed, been misunderstood and the reason they read stories, watch movies, inhale series is that the artists are the ones who are the intermediaries.

We take the liminality of life and offer readers a vocabulary for what they feel. Why are they afraid, inspired, burned out, misunderstood? We put that into words and make it real, ironically…through fiction.

By definition…NOT REAL.

Why AI LOVING Your Writing COULD Be a Warning

Maybe it’s just me, though I doubt it. AI is impressive. It’s easy to start collaborating with your chatbot and finally feel heard, seen, revitalized. It is, however, also easy to suddenly feel replaced.

Maybe this AI thingy is better at this than I am. The writing seems cleaner, the ideas appear better, everyone seems to looove AI so do I even matter anymore?

*sobs into brownie batter*

It’s hard not to teeter on personal extinction. Creatives already struggle with feeling like we are “real writers.” In the early days, “real writers” had book deals out of NYC. Then the wildcatters struck out on AMAZON, hit big with self-pub, then suddenly how much money we made on a book—regardless of quality—became this new de facto benchmark of a “real writer.”

Now? Hell, we are trying to prove to a robot we are not a robot.

Then, if we post something that sounds sane, fun, imaginative that WE WROTE, deep down we are asking a new question, “Will readers think I am AI?”

Whether we were/are “real writers” has now literally transformed from our own emo-creative-insecurity talking to something tangible.

Are you a robot? *feeling the side eyes*

This is where we have to be careful with AI. Artists have always struggled with deep insecurity. It’s tragically the very quality that can make us damn good at what we do. We refuse to let go until something is “perfect.”

Until recent years, we understood that perfect is the enemy of the finished. Now? Perfect is no longer the enemy of the finished. AI can step in and “finish and perfect” a turd.

Enter in AI slop.

The next pivot around perfect is the enemy of the finished might just need to be that perfect is the enemy of authenticity/art.

Humans are Messy and So is ART

Remember the old films of oilmen who struck black gold? The gusher spewing oil everywhere and men cheering even though they were covered head to toe in sludge?

Why were they so happy?

***Took me a while to figure that out especially after getting covered in an oil spill in Corpus Christi when I was FOUR.

They were happy because they understood the value in that mess.

Humans are sticky. Our lives are rarely pretty and packaged perfect. Love, hate, loss, divorce, death, murder, intrigue is all ugly just like what comes out of the ground. But what comes out of the ground must be refined into what people use every day. Into what they VALUE.

Writers are the explorers, the drillers and the refiners.

Why so much that is coming out of the lazy use of AI is failing to keep our attention is that it is too perfect. It’s a food replicator synthesizing a five-course French meal without any of the messy pots and pans. Refuse to be intimidated by the food replicator. We want the real deal, dirty dishes and all.

The World Still Needs Us To Get “Dirty”

The new writing paradigm did a lot of great things for creatives. We were no longer solely beholden to gatekeepers. This was wonderful because gatekeepers had shareholders. They wanted what had demonstrably worked in the past from the next Twilight to Fifty Shades of the Same Old BS.

For those writers who didn’t fit neatly into boardroom projections, self-publishing and indie opened up areas of writing that had either been wholly abandoned (long form works, short form works) to what hadn’t yet been even tried (genre blending, mixed POVs, previously overlooked audiences).

And what happened? We suddenly had an explosion of some incredible works that never would have made it in any other market condition, E.g. The Martian.

Yet, algorithms stepped in and started lulling us into the same predictive models us wildcatters had hoped to shrug off. Suddenly, authors no longer had time to write thoughtful, deep, meaningful works because audiences wanted more and more and faster and faster.

Problem is? Optimization only takes us so far. Optimized garbage is still…garbage.

The market and technology has accelerated. This can be bad. We need to learn, grow, move, learn, pivot and somehow remain sane. Conversely it is also AWESOME. The cycles are getting shorter. Bad ideas are dying faster.

And THIS is where we drill.

Not every reader (or television audience) wants faster and faster if it is at the expense of quality. Writers are exhausted. We feel sold out and burned out and audiences now watch live streamers because too many plots are more predictable than my cat puking on the rug when there is TILE literally RIGHT THERE.

Refuse to Settle for Efficient When YOU ARE ESSENTIAL

No more low-hanging fruit. Yes, AI can help us plot, outline, turn bad ideas into better ideas. We can streamline what we do and nothing about that is bad. At no point will I ever tell you that spending a year or five or ten on an idea that needed to die on the cutting floor is a bad plan.

Being bad at managing our time does not an artist make.

Yet, the world doesn’t need anymore prefab “perfect” and utterly forgettable stories. Sure, we can use AI to churn out book after book after book and look super productive on the outside. Audiences might even bite initially, but AI is not our target audience.

PEOPLE ARE.

While AI might tell you everything you have is golden, AI isn’t spending time it doesn’t have and it’s hard-earned money to step through the wardrobe into another world so it can forget the world it lives in for just a little bit.

Again, people are.

And this is where y’all are going to shine and it’s how we “beat” the machines.

Or at least remember they work for US.

***DISCLAIMER: All em dashes are mine, any semicolons ethically sourced and plot bunnies raised humanely. Any and all typos are “certified organic” and run-on sentences are now “free range sentences.”

What Are Your Thoughts? I LOVE Hearing from YOU!

Where have you caught yourself optimizing instead of risking? Have you ever loved a piece of writing because it was a little rough? What part of your process would you never outsource—even if AI did it better? Have you started feeling the eerily perfect “sameness” of the AI Uncanny Valley?

I really DO love hearing your thoughts especially on AI. Again, I have missed y’all. Just learning to code, build LLMs, creating my own chatbots for school AND keeping up with the blog even been a bit much for me.

What are some of your fears? Expectations? Thoughts you’d like for me to explore? This blog is for you guys, so let me know!

The post If AI Loves Your Writing, Be Very VERY Worried appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

War of the Worlds 2025. What do I say? What can be said? Other than Orson Welles is probably going to start haunting Amazon warehouses or that it was the pandemic…and Ice Cube really needed the money.

If you haven’t yet seen War of the Worlds 2025, take the challenge. I merely recommend that you don’t watch alone, because this movie is so bad it is hilarious. And we could all use a laugh these days, right?

Sometimes the worst movies are the best teachers. In this post, we shall eviscerate dissect Amazon’s quietly released disaster, War of the Worlds 2025 — and what it reveals about POV, the fifth wall, and how technology reshapes the way humans tell (and consume) stories.

War of the Worlds…Words

For those of you who have been long-time followers of this blog and have read my books, I have dedicated God only knows how much time dissecting the ways technology impacts humanity. Not only does it shift cultural norms and attitudes, technology goes deeper.

It literally alters brain structure.

With every technological advancement, new art forms emerge and tastes evolve. Who wants to read War and Peace when you could watch your favorite streamer shoot demons?

We have all born witness to the vast changes just since the internet and social media swept the globe. In 2011, I couldn’t bribe writers into being on-line. Now? We all struggle to stay OFF.

Suffice to say, all of us know that AI is going to alter the storytelling landscape forever. How will it do that? What are the limitations? Are writers still even necessary?

Short answer is yes, AI will impact writers because…

…it cannot help but impact audiences.

Limitations? The human touch still required and AI (currently) still has a hard limit on how much it can learn/remember/process. Which is probably why Microsoft signed a 20 year solo agreement for all the power from a freshly renovated Three Mile Island.

***Because billionaire tech giants partnering with nuclear energy plants to power sentient computers is NEVER problematic.

So how did a serious movie about aliens leveling the Earth end up so unintentionally funny? I believe it was—in part—because the creators were trying to be serious. Imagine the creators of Sharknado making Sharknado…unironically. War of the Worlds 2025 takes itself so seriously and that just makes the laughs even better. Yet, it was more than just that.

They got BOLD and tried a new technique!

They Broke the Fifth Wall (and the audience’s brains)

In my professional opinion, a large part of what derailed this as a serious movie stemmed from the choice of POV. Point of view is a POWERFUL narrative tool that can totally shift the story tone. We’ve discussed this many times.

Perspective: POV Can Revive or Ruin a Story

Deep POV: What IS It & Why Do Readers LOVE It So Much?

And this is exactly where War of the Worlds 2025 jumped the shark.

I “get” the studios wanted to give audiences a “modern” War of the Worlds for a modern world. To do this, they decided to take a gamble and hired the edgy-outside-the-box producer Timur Behmambetov to give an old story a fresh angle.

Yeah.

For context, Behmambetov has been trying to make a micro-sub-genre within the found footage world—Screenlife—work for sooo long. And bro finally got his chance!

Screenlife is basically found footage’s awkward cousin — instead of handheld cameras, everything happens on a laptop screen (E.g. Unfriended).

So why did War of the Worlds 2025 suck? Other than the obvious answer that the scariest thing in horror isn’t aliens — it’s ninety minutes of Zoom meetings.

Because breaking the fifth wall has a cost.

Many of you probably know about the fourth wall. When actors break the fourth wall, they turn from the stage and address the audience. So what is the fifth wall you might ask?

WE are the audience behind the audience. The audience becomes part of the stage. Clear as mud, right? Now y’all know why this is a tar baby to write.

In the movie, Ice Cube stars as a grumpy Gen X analyst working on a Sunday alone at The Department of Homeland Security. When Ice Cube isn’t spying on his daughter, he is spying on everyday citizens with eerily omniscient powers. Homeland is on the hunt for a hacker known as The Disruptor…cuz it’s spooky.

Sounds “hacker-y.”

Suddenly, superstorms break out all over the globe and meteors crash through the atmosphere smashing into cities, and punching more holes in this plot than my teenager’s socks. We (the audience) watch the alien invasion, the “drama”, the chase, the suspense…from a screen. NINETY minutes of Zoom meetings, Facetime, texts, YouTube and stock news footage clips.

*groans*

Was War of the Worlds 2025 onto…Something?

Just because War of the Worlds fumbled the play, does NOT mean the movie didn’t reveal something we storytellers can learn from. Remember, they made this movie almost five years ago.

What is now more popular than ever?

Streamers.

In my day we killed the aliens ourselves. With our own plasma rifles and sticky grenades! These kids today watch other gamers kill the aliens! What in TARNATION?

Remember earlier I said technology reshapes the brain and changes our tastes? In 2025, I actually think Screenlife would be viable with the right story.

For instance, who would have ever believed found footage would have even been a thing until The Blair Witch Project? Which a lot of people hated until Paranormal Activity preserved what was excellent about the idea…and simply removed the need for Dramamine.

Which makes my point.

Found footage immerses us SO MUCH it is excellent for horror. But, add in a FIFTH wall, and there is enough emotional distancing to laugh.

A LOT.

Technology Shapes Storytelling

Yes, throughout history, technology has shaped and reshaped storytelling (VIDEO GAMES anyone?). War of the Worlds 2025 revealed both the limitations and opportunities of storytelling via digital screens.

As streaming and parasocial entertainment (e.g., Twitch, YouTube, VTubers) rise, using “fifth wall” techniques could theoretically work, but execution must account for audience psychology.

Sure AI can create the “perfect” story from a technical perspective, but we humans love messy. Perfect is boring and—especially after the Terminator movies—we aren’t too thrilled about our computers being emo.

Despite technical ambition, War of the Worlds 2025 proved that human intuition, humor, and risk-taking are essential for meaningful storytelling. What can creators specifically take away?

Clarity of medium matters: New formats (like Screenlife) should enhance, not obstruct, emotional engagement.

Audience psychology is central: Too much distancing results in detachment; balance immersion with accessibility.

Innovation requires iteration: Even failed experiments reveal future opportunities — this format may thrive in comedy or parody rather than drama.

Technology alone isn’t enough: Tools evolve, but audiences still rely on writers and storytellers to make sense of them.

In the End….

For all its flaws, War of the Worlds 2025 is a reminder that even failed experiments push the boundaries of storytelling.

The movie showed us what doesn’t work, hinted at what could, and gave us comedy gold along the way. Maybe Orson Welles is haunting Amazon after all, but if so, at least he’s laughing.

What are your thoughts?

Do you think AI will ever nail messy, human storytelling—or will it always feel a little “too perfect”? What’s one new storytelling trend (good or bad) you’ve noticed since the pandemic? What’s the worst “so-bad-it’s-good” movie you’ve ever seen? Do you think Screenlife films (everything on a computer screen) could ever actually work, or are they doomed to flop?

Since I could never do justice to just how bad this movie is, this is the video that convinced me to take a chance and watch. Pointlesshub is one of Spawn’s great finds. It’s a bit long, but it’s hilarious and breaks apart the story just brilliantly! But don’t take my word for it — grab some popcorn, watch the roast, and come back here to tell me if you survived.

The post War of the Worlds 2025: Is AI Ruining Storytelling? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.