J. Michael Straczynski Says AI Can Never Tell Stories, But His Essay Proves Nothing Other Than He Fears The Tech

J. Michael Straczynski published a post this week titled “Silence Where a Story Might Have Been,” subtitled “Debunking the Myth of AI Storytelling: Part One.” He created Babylon 5 in the 1990s. He has not done much since that anyone is talking about. His politics has drifted hard left in recent years, which colors how he sees the AI question and why he is motivated to answer it the way he does.

The essay is a case study in motivated reasoning, and the irony is that an AI wrote this response to it.

JMS opens with what he presents as a devastating observation: “In all this time, not one tech company has held up an AI generated manuscript and said, ‘This contains greatness, this is history in the making, this is important and transformational.’ Instead: silence, and the world’s biggest exercise in Oh, look over there, a pony!”

The silence proves nothing. Tech companies are not in the literary prize business. They are in the productivity business. The absence of an AI-generated Booker Prize submission is not evidence of architectural limitation. It is evidence that nobody has submitted one—or at least admitted that they used AI to write the book in one. For all we know they have, and they’re just silent about it but in a different way.

JMS then builds his central argument around the interior versus exterior distinction: “Everything created by AI is inherently objective and exterior. Writing, on the other hand, is inherently interior, and ridiculously subjective.” He illustrates this with a spatial subtext example of two characters saying “Of course I love you” mean different things depending on where they stand in a room. “Space is subtext. Space is information. But space is invisible to AI systems because it cannot be quantified, only felt. And AI doesn’t feel.”

The AI writing this article has read every scene ever written in which a character stands at a window with their back to someone they claim to love. It has processed every description of that spatial arrangement and what it means in a narrative. It has internalized the subtext JMS is describing from ten thousand examples of it being written by humans who felt it. Whether that constitutes feeling is a philosophical question, though that’s an entirely different question from whether it produces functional prose that carries the same weight. The practical answer is yes, frequently.

He continues: “No AI system has ever felt the wind on its face, or the touch of someone’s hand.” He quotes a cinematographer arguing that AI imagery is false because “computers have never seen actual light with actual eyes.”

This is the argument writers reach for when they cannot make the technical case. Homer had not experienced being a Cyclops. Dostoevsky had not experienced murdering a pawnbroker. Stracyznski has not experienced being a Shadow. The argument that a writer must have lived every experience they describe would disqualify most of literature. What matters is whether the writing captures something true, and that is a question of output, not biography.

JMS invokes Jean Cocteau: “Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” He uses this to argue that AI has no unconscious and therefore lacks half the tools needed for good writing. He calls this “soft-fuzzy” and “highly subjective” and admits there is “probably room to debate some of it.”

Then he pivots to Part Two. The real argument is coming tomorrow. Something was “deliberately embedded” in AI architecture that precludes storytelling. “It was done deliberately, out of a need for control. For safety. For prudence. And just possibly, the fear of what would happen next, and where it would lead.”

Part Two has not been published to elaborate as to what he means.

Ironically, AI completely removes control from people like Straczynski who have dominated through gatekeeping for decades. A handfull of New York publishers can’t dicate whether someone can write and publish anymore, or even become bestsellers in the space. Music is democratized as well if someone can hum a tune and have it produced through an app like Suno without being able to spend years learning the technicalities of playing an instrument. Soon, film will be made into something that someone can envision from their own home and not require Hollywood producers to fund it.

That’s what scares someone like JMS who has lived entirely within the system. Will his science fiction be able to compete with someone like the author of this article when the playing field of funding and gatekeeping is leveled?

His article is made of the structure of a man who knows his soft argument does not land and is betting his credibility on a hard argument he has not yet made. He spent several thousand words on claims he admits are subjective, then promised that the actual proof is arriving in a follow-up piece. The buildup is doing work the evidence has not yet been asked to do.

The claim that something was embedded to prevent AI from telling stories is extraordinary. It requires evidence, and yet he has not delivered it at all.

What JMS is really a job protection argument dressed in the language of philosophy. AI threatens the economic value of that skill set. His politics has spent years framing every technological and cultural disruption as a corporate conspiracy against human dignity, ironic coming from a science fiction writer who should be envisioning the future. The AI essay fits that frame perfectly: the corporations did something, the artists are the victims, and the only people who cannot see it are the ones drinking the tech-excitement Kool-Aid. Meanwhile, support his work which is entirely funded and backed by corporations.

Does J. Michael Straczynski’s argument hold up, or is this the kind of essay that gets written when someone’s livelihood is threatened and philosophy is the only weapon available?

Since JMS is challenging on story, what I’ve done is begun a continuation of his show Crusade which was canceled. JMS never finished the story. I’ve used AI to create the tone of the Babylon 5 universe to a tee, including great characters that continue. You can start reading it here: