In February 2022, nine months before ChatGPT launched, a story scientist sat down with me and argued that computers cannot be creative.
Not “aren’t yet.” Cannot.
Angus Fletcher started out as a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. Then he left the lab to do a PhD in Shakespeare at Yale. Then DARPA, Hollywood, and US Special Operations came knocking. Ask yourself what elite soldiers want from a Shakespeare scholar, because the answer is not what you’d guess.
His case rests on a claim most of the #AI industry has bet billions against: the brain is not a computer, and the difference is physical, not a matter of more data or bigger models. For Angus, story is the operating system of the human brain, and #literature is the engine of science rather than its decorative cousin.
We went for two hours. We argued about my own definition of story, about why a multiplicity might serve us better than a #singularity, and about Humanism versus AI-ism.
Four years and one generative AI gold rush later, I went back and rewatched it. You can decide for yourself whether the past four years proved him wrong or proved his point.
