Why (Human) Stories Matter to (Artificial) Intelligence
I built a con artist into one of my favorite stories on purpose. He stopped me on the street, told me he could see the stress on my face, opened a book, and wrote down the number 101. Every time I tell that story, the room leans in the same way. Not because the words are fancy. Because the moment is real.
That is the part artificial intelligence cannot touch. It can organize a speech. It cannot live a life.
AI can organize a speech. It cannot live your life
I have been building something called SSA-i. Here is how it works. You tell it two things: who you are as a speaker, and what you are speaking on for this particular moment. The tool pulls from a library of speaking strategies and hands you back a formula, a specific combination of techniques built for that moment.
When I first described this to our team, our founder Rose Kaz said something that stuck with me. She said the tool I was describing was human intelligence, formalized. That I had just described what AI, done right, is supposed to do.
She was right, and it reframed the whole project for me. SSA-i is not a shortcut around the human work. It is a bridge. AI can organize, match, and recommend. But the library it pulls from, the raw material, has to come from human stories. Take the humans out, and the tool has nothing to work with. An empty formula is just math.
Meet the library: the one minute story arc
A few weeks ago I ran an Open Session on the one minute story arc. Five micro-skills, drilled one at a time. This is the human intelligence library, in practice.
- Choosing the right story. Not the biggest story. The right one for this room, this moment.
- Finding the defining moment. What was the moment when everything changed?
- Structuring it in three sentences. Setup, moment, ending. Nothing more.
- Conveying emotion without naming it. Show me, don't tell me.
- Landing a message. The story has to add up to something.
None of that comes from a machine. All of it can be deployed by one, once you have done the work.
Three sentences, no filler
We rented a tandem bike for the whole family. Could not hit the brakes as it raced down the hill. A branch broke our fall before we died.
Three sentences. Setup, moment, ending. That is the whole drill, and it works at any age. Our youngest participant ever at SSA, a kid named Bowen, built his own three-sentence story about a trip to the gorge with his grandmother, finding places to talk and explore, and making videos so they would remember it. Same structure. Same power.
One of our members, Nir, put it best after watching a room full of three-sentence stories land one after another: these are all LinkedIn post openers. He was not wrong. Great storytelling is not about eliminating details to make a story shorter. It is about choosing the right details to make a story better. Researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Business have long made a version of this case: audiences consistently remember stories far longer than they remember facts, because a story gives a fact somewhere to live.
Order changes everything
Here is a drill I love. Take the same three sentences and tell them in a different order. The story changes completely, and so does what the audience feels at the end. It is the same reason a famous film ending gets reworked before release. The facts do not change. The order does, and the order is the story.
That is a human judgment call. It will stay a human judgment call. AI can hand you options once you have made it. It cannot make it for you.
The stories are the intelligence
Your stories are the intelligence. SSA-i helps you deploy them. But first you have to build the library, and the only way to build it is to drill. With other humans. On purpose.
That is what an Open Session is for, and it is exactly the room where a three-sentence story about a tandem bike or a gorge with your grandmother turns into a library you can pull from for the rest of your speaking life.
Speaker Skills Academy community member Rose Kaz wrote about this same edge from a different angle in Why You Should Practice Speaking In Person Now That AI Can Do Almost Everything Else. Her piece is about presence. Mine is about the raw material presence is built from. Read them back to back.
Want to feel this instead of just reading about it? Come drill it with us at an Open Session. It is free, monthly, and it is exactly where the story I told you about the con artist got sharpened into three sentences worth keeping. Or check what is coming up in Sessions and Programming.
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