I used to have a ritual: a morning tea and a visit to a website featuring “micro-stories.” These were 1–2 minute windows into other lives—supposedly real experiences sent in by readers. I didn’t care if a professional editor polished them or if they were raw submissions; they had a pulse. I felt the sting of their regrets and the warmth of their small victories.
But then, the atmosphere changed.
At first, I couldn’t pin it down. The topics were still “interesting.” The grammar was actually better than before. The vocabulary was sophisticated. Yet, I found myself closing the tab halfway through a story. I wasn’t hungry for the next one anymore.
When I realized the site had switched to AI-generated stories, the pieces of the puzzle clicked. I had been experiencing the Uncanny Valley of Storytelling.
The Nervous System Gap
AI has no nervous system. It knows that “fear” and “racing heart” are statistically linked, but it doesn’t understand the sensation. In its attempt to be ‘perfect,’ it often narrates the emotion directly. This leads to “hallucinated” descriptions that sound poetic but lack the grit of lived experience.
The “appetite” for a story comes from a subconscious search for shared humanity. A human writer might show a character’s grief by having them obsessively clean a toaster. The AI version uses “all the right words,” but it uses them in a way that is mathematically safe. It doesn’t know what makes the memory hurt. By removing the specific, “ugly,” or idiosyncratic details to make the story “sound nice,” the AI accidentally removed the reason for the story to exist.
Decorative Content vs. Emotional Nutrition
The editors likely thought they were “leveling up.” Why wait for a reader to send a coherent draft when you can feed a prompt into a machine and get a “perfect” story in three seconds? But they forgot one thing: Stories are a bridge between two nervous systems. If there isn’t a nervous system on the other end of the line, the bridge leads nowhere.
The danger of AI storytelling isn’t that it’s bad; it’s that it’s perfectly inadequate.
A story is meant to be consumed. You take it into your system, and it changes your chemistry. You “eat” a story to satisfy an emotional hunger—a desire to be understood, surprised, or moved.
AI writing is like Plastic Fruit. Visually, it looks perfect. The “skin” is shiny; the color is vibrant. It fills a bowl on a table and looks “right” from across the room. But there is no scent. No juice. If you try to eat it, you gain no energy. It is decorative, not substantive. It exists to look like a story without actually being one.
As humans, we crave Real Fruit. Real fruit is rarely perfect. It might be irregular in shape. It might have a bruise from a fall or a tiny scar from a bug bite. It might be startlingly sour or overwhelmingly sweet. But it has texture, moisture, and sugar. It has a core that you have to eat around—a hard truth or a difficult memory. It doesn’t just sit there looking nice; it nourishes you while it triggers a cascade of different feelings.
If a website is only meant to be “decorative content” that fills space on a screen, AI is perfect. But you cannot survive on a diet of plastic.
The Missing “Glitch”
What AI misses is the glitch—the irrational, hyper-specific detail that shouldn’t matter, but does. We may not remember every detail, like the exact brand of cigarettes a grandpa smoked, but we remember the specific things: the smell of wet dogs and floor wax during a breakup. These are details that have nothing to do with ‘romance’ but everything to do with the truth of that moment.
AI smooths those edges. It gives us the “average” of human experience. And as it turns out, the average of human experience is remarkably bland. We don’t read to find the average; we read to find the exceptional, the messy, and the real.
In Japan, we are taught to love and respect real food from childhood. We learn the value of nutrition and the soul of a well-prepared meal. We know that if food is boring, kids lose their interest in eating. If the world becomes filled with AI-generated content—perfectly smooth, perfectly bland, and perfectly empty—people will simply stop reading.
So, let’s get real.
Don’t let your ability to express yourself fade away. Take a moment today. Put the AI aside. Write your own words, with your own mind, and your own “glitches.” Even if it’s just a sentence. Even if it’s messy or bruised.
Give us something real to eat.