At this point, most people are catching up to AI speak. I’m seeing it specifically in the lack of emotionally coherent metaphors. Those are the metaphors that are supposed to be grounded in something the writer has genuinely experienced.
Thing is, for a while, I’ve been seeing something similar in stories by screenwriters who haven’t lived the emotional experiences they’re putting characters through. I’m thinking about love and longing for example.
In The Mood For Love (2000)
It's always interesting to read a story by someone still collecting young adult life experiences that tries to tackle marital infidelity, abandoned dreams, or unrequited love with the weight of In The Mood For Love. These stories feel like a manual on cos-playing a mid-life crisis. I find that the ones that do work come from writers taking from adjacent experience like the impact of a divorce in the family, watching someone else grieve but never from a purely imagined place. Those are always a good read or watch
Honestly, it’s understandable. Western culture demands we grow up immediately, we over-sexualize youth and grab-the-bag culture is all about efficiency not experience. So it makes sense that young artists ‘emote’ rather than feel. It also makes sense why the use of generative AI has been adopted so widely, so quickly.
The common thread that I’m seeing is that both works come from a place of an inexperienced life. To me, an experienced life is one where you constantly engage with the world and notice how you react to it. A life spent interacting with others, noticing their actual emotions and thoughts as they respond to what’s happening in the world. In other words, the perpetual acts of experiencing, feeling, noticing and empathizing.
Cinema is an empathy machine built from emotional experiences. No matter the genre, a film is always trying to evoke an emotional experience for the audience. In his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, psychologist Julian Jaynes suggests that metaphors do not just describe reality but they have the ability to create a new way of experiencing it. The thing is, in order to successfully do so, for a metaphor to be effective, it relies completely on pre-existing, concrete, and shared physical experiences.
In other words, metaphors create new experiences built on what we’ve already felt. AI can’t do that. Neither can a writer/filmmaker who hasn’t lived an experience they’re trying to depict.
I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t write what you don’t know, that writers should only write what they’ve lived. I just believe that we have an obligation to earn these emotional claims by experiencing and living life. Get blown away by the beauty of love and sit through the devastation of betrayal. Feel that in your body. Even if it isn’t yours. Write what you don’t know if you have to, but perhaps be honest about not knowing it.