Do you remember The NeverEnding Story?^[1] I struggled to find the post that triggered this idea again to link it here, but regardless… someone recently wrote online that The NeverEnding Story could actually be watched as a prescient parable of AI.

Recall that film? I’ll wait here while you rewatch it. Or, just let me recap: Meet Bastian, a kid who lifts a magnificent tome from a dusty bookstore, hides in the attic of his school, and there reads the story of the land of Fantasia. This is a magical land brought to life by the imagination of readers, but it is being consumed by a dark all-consuming force called The Nothing. The tale is relayed through the course of the movie as the parallel quests—a journey rife with adventure and a battle for hope against darkness—by Bastian (in the real world) and the hero Atreyu (in the fictional world) all to uncover the truth of the Nothing that is consuming Fantasia and all that is contained within it so they can attempt to stop it.

The Nothing, or so we assumed in the 1980s when this movie was released, was a message about the waning imaginations of children everywhere, attentions consumed by television and video games, and too a cultural crisis topic onto which parents and the media had long since latched. The Nothing was an allegory meant to remind kids everywhere that their dreams built worlds, their creativity was bigger and more important than themselves, and that it was human to tell stories and invent universes.

These days the story seems a little too on the nose, particularly when we fast forward forty years and look at a much bigger cultural crisis of imagination and creativity that emerges from the shadows in the form of generative AI. 

It’s hardly a stretch of either imagination or interpretation to see how a mysterious dark force creeping over the very act of invention and imagination transposes neatly into this modern moment. The Nothing, that force that is shutting down human capacity to bring things beyond our reality to life through fiction and speculation and dreams, is all too real and often found in our fingertips as we type prompts into algorithms churning our ideas in algorithmically-generated content.

What was the lesson of film?

Might it be that human imagination is not a product but rather it is a process: a journey, an adventure, and perhaps even a battle in need of vigilance, persistence and bravery? I think so.