My late father was born in the U.S. to Greek immigrant parents who worked hard to get ahead. On my mother’s side, her mother was a classical pianist and her father was a well known Western writer. Starting at age 8 I did magic until at 18, opportunity arose in Los Angeles. I later moved to Manhattan, NYC in 1988 and have been here ever since.
What have I learned as an artist, businessperson and educator?
In Our Lives and Work Story is Key
Story has been my thing since the very beginning. Even in my early years when I was practicing another art form, I took a new approach and integrated storytelling into its presentation.
We all tell stories of our lives and work, the things we experience daily, our thoughts, our insights, they are all stories. We are all storytellers, communicating with others through the story.
At age 8, the same year I decided what I was going to be when I grew up, living in a hippie house truck with my parents and three younger siblings, I would tell my brother and two sisters stories, magical tales, that I created as I spoke to them.
Story allows one to look at good versus evil. It is an opportunity to do good by showing how the other path inevitably ends badly.
I recently became captivated with AI and its possibilities for doing good for humanity by integrating the telling of stories. My first inclination was toward AI helping to tell the stories but have come to realize that actual human people do that best.
AI can clearly be good for the corporate world but what about the individuals who lose their jobs and are replaced by it? And it can negatively impact artists too. I worry about the ways it can take creative jobs from people. Look at what has been showing up with artists potentially losing their livelihood to it. For example, writers of stories and even those acting out those stories. Whether one uses AI in their creative process or not is a personal choice.
And yet, because AI either directly or indirectly impacts our lives, AI is a force that sometimes seems almost magical that is going affect our stories that we tell as humans one way or another.
Whether we think of ourselves as a teller of stories or not as a teller of stories, we are a teller of stories. And our individual and collective stories are bigger than AI.
Therefore, it is all our responsibility when telling stories that we come from a place that is very much ourselves.
Our personal magic of storytelling is always there to serve us for whatever we want to achieve, because in our lives and work story is key.