The Next Face of Fiction When old stories lose their authority, the struggle is not simply over what we believe. It is over who gets to shape reality and who is allowed to question it.

I began thinking about this after reading Azeem Azhar’s essay, “The Unraveling of Fictions,” which examines how arrangements such as employment, credentials, and expertise lose their organizing power as technology changes what is scarce.

Such arrangements were not necessarily lies. They were social agreements built to solve real problems. A job bundled income, identity, and security. A degree offered a shortcut for evaluating competence. An expert helped people navigate knowledge they could not easily access themselves.

But what happens when the conditions that made these agreements useful begin to change?

And more importantly, who gets to write the stories that replace them?

In this article, I do not use fiction to mean a falsehood. I mean the shared beliefs through which people make reality livable: the assumptions that allow strangers to cooperate, institutions to exercise authority, and money to retain its value.

We rarely notice these agreements while they work. We notice them when reality refuses to cooperate.

When the story on the screen fails

I felt that moment, when reality refuses to cooperate, over $200.

A friend in Florida wanted to send me money through Zelle, which I could not receive directly. I asked someone who had a Zelle account if they would receive the money on my behalf, and they agreed.

My friend shared screenshots. The payment appeared pending, then completed. But the money never reached me, and I could not get a clear explanation.

There was a record. There was a status. Yet the outcome I needed was missing.

It was a small incident, not proof of some grand institutional failure. But it left me with a question larger than the amount involved: what does a system’s claim mean to the person who cannot verify its outcome?

A banknote is paper. A digital balance is a record. Neither can feed a family simply by existing. Their practical power depends on shared confidence that the record means something, that transactions can be verified, and that someone will answer when the expected outcome does not arrive.

Trust is not merely a feeling about a system. It is part of the infrastructure that allows people to depend on it.

The vacuum left by old beliefs

The weakening of shared stories is not happening in isolation. Confidence in institutions has been under pressure for decades, although the causes and consequences differ across societies.

In the United States, Pew Research Center reported in December 2025 that only 17 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time.

That figure does not explain every source of public disillusionment, nor does it establish a universal collapse of trust. It does, however, illustrate the distance between an institution’s formal authority and the confidence people place in it.

Technology adds another pressure. It is changing what work means, how expertise is recognized, and how people encounter information. Meanwhile, economic insecurity and political conflict make it harder to believe that existing arrangements serve a common good.

But a story can lose credibility without truth automatically taking its place.

The space left behind may be occupied by a more honest account of reality. It may also be occupied by conspiracy, manufactured certainty, grievance, or a charismatic voice promising to explain everything.

When people no longer trust the old interpreter, they do not stop needing interpretation. They look elsewhere.

That is where the next struggle begins.

The machine that can tell us what we want to hear

Artificial intelligence makes the struggle over who shapes our shared stories, and whether we can tell which ones are true, more urgent.

A persuasive explanation once required time, skill, access, or institutional authority. Now AI can produce an essay, image, voice, or plausible account of an event in seconds. It can adapt its language to different audiences and make an answer feel personal.

There is real value here. These systems can widen access to knowledge, help people express ideas, and make complicated subjects easier to approach.

But when convincing representations become abundant, their existence tells us less about their truth.

A polished explanation is not necessarily reliable. A familiar voice is not proof of who is speaking. A coherent narrative does not establish that the events it describes occurred.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology identifies AI confabulation—the confident production of erroneous or false content—as a significant risk, particularly when people rely on outputs in consequential situations.

The problem, then, is not simply that machines can produce falsehoods. It is that they can make falsehoods easier to believe, distribute, and personalize.

Every suspicion may find an apparent confirmation. Every ideology may find a polished justification. Every group may receive a version of reality in which its own assumptions are never challenged by evidence or by anyone who disagrees.

AI did not invent our appetite for comforting stories. Humans have always bent evidence to protect identity, status, and belonging. Nor have institutions ever held a monopoly on truth.

What AI changes is the speed, scale, and intimacy with which stories can be produced.

The next face of fiction may not look like fiction at all. It may look like an answer that understands us, a voice that reassures us, or an explanation that removes uncertainty before we have examined the evidence.

The most persuasive story may be the one that no longer feels like a story.

Who gets to decide what is real?

Behind this technological shift lies a human question: Who has the power to shape the beliefs through which society organizes itself?

Who decides which information becomes visible? Who benefits when one interpretation dominates? Who bears the cost when a convincing account turns out to be wrong? And what recourse does an ordinary person have when the system, institution, or authority they depend on refuses to explain itself?

These are not questions that technical capability can answer.

A system may generate an answer without establishing its truth. A platform may influence belief without earning the authority to determine it. A company may give millions of people a voice while retaining disproportionate power over what those people encounter.

The humanist tradition offers a useful standard here. The American Humanist Association grounds humanism in reason, compassion, shared humanity, and the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Applied to emerging technology, that orientation asks us to judge systems not merely by what they can do, but by how they affect human lives and whether their power remains open to scrutiny.

That standard matters because a more powerful storyteller does not automatically make a wiser society. Sometimes it only makes the consequences of a bad story arrive faster.

The story worth building

I do not believe the answer is to escape stories. Humans need them to interpret experience, cooperate across differences, and imagine futures that do not yet exist.

The task is to become more conscious of the stories we live by—and more willing to revise them when reality stops supporting them.

A credible institution should explain its decisions and accept scrutiny. A trustworthy technology should make room for uncertainty rather than disguise it with confidence. A meaningful vision of progress should be judged by what it makes better for human beings, not merely by what it makes possible.

This is not a demand for a world without error. It is a demand for accountability when error occurs.

Eventually, every grand narrative meets an ordinary life: the worker wondering whether the skills that once provided security still matter; the family trying to make its money last; the citizen asking why an institution made a decision that changed their future; the person waiting for a payment a screen says has arrived.

At that point, the story must become more than convincing. It must answer to reality.

I return to my unresolved $200 because the experience exposed a small version of a much larger problem. A system can display a status without giving someone the understanding or outcome they need. Authority can make a claim without resolving the uncertainty of the person who depends on it.

The same tension now runs through our information systems, political institutions, and emerging AI tools. We are surrounded by increasingly capable ways to produce explanations. We still need reliable ways to test them.

Perhaps the next face of fiction will be more humane. Perhaps it will be more manipulative. Neither outcome is guaranteed by technology itself. The difference will depend on the choices made by the people who build, govern, use, and challenge these systems.

The old stories may be losing their hold. That does not mean we should accept whatever comes next.

It means we have a responsibility to ask better questions of the stories that seek our belief.

The future should not belong to whoever can make a story most convincing. It should belong to a society willing to ask whether that story is true, whom it serves, and what happens when it fails.

Because the deepest measure of a story is not how many people believe it. It is whether the reality it creates is one in which human beings can live with dignity, freedom, and their eyes open.