As AI creeps its way into nearly every facet of daily life, including art direction in video games with Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 tech, there's still hope that a hard line will be drawn before dialogue and scripts are AI generated.
Telling and interpreting stories is an ancient human tradition, connecting different perspectives for millennia, and even if you can get past AI's inherently non-human nature and thus its inability to tell a truly original story, it's just not very practical, according to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 narrative lead Jennifer Svedberg-Yen.
Among its endless accolades extending well into 2026, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has seen near-universal praise for its deeply human story, which explores themes of loss, grief, and mortality – again, things AI really struggles with – and Svedberg-Yen tells us she feels a spectrum of very human emotions in her writing process.
"Writing is part of the joy," she says. "It's also part of the pain. They say that there's two types of writers: those who write and they're inspired and fired up, and they enjoy it. And then there are writers who write through the pain. I think I write through the pain.
"It's a painful process, but that process is incredibly vital to me as a writer, to actually work through what the characters are feeling, work through what they would say, think through how the emotions feel within myself, and then understanding the characters and who they are, like translating that into their words, and finding the truth in that moment. I don't know how to do that with AI."
This is essentially a very eloquent way of saying storytelling is intrinsically human and thus antithetical to the idea of AI generation. The whole point of telling stories is to foster human connection, and Svedberg-Yen is saying, in very practical terms, she doesn't know how to do that when one side of the equation isn't human.
"The whole point of writing is to express what I have in my head. Right? It's meant to express our, as writers, our point of view, our understanding of the world, and relay something about our personal, lived experience channeled through these characters in this fantastical scenario," she says. "And I feel that you risk losing some of that when it's put through essentially a black box where you can't necessarily understand all the ways that AI gets from A to Z."
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