Jennifer Horgan: Our human stories are universal, eternal, and outshine the slop of AI
A mixture of disbelief, jubilation, and celebration sweeps through Mayo supporters inside Croke Park as the final whistle confirms victory over Kerry in the All-Ireland GAA SFC final, ending the county’s 75-year wait for Sam Maguire. Picture: Chani Anderson
What is more miraculous? Mayo’s All-Ireland win or Christopher Nolan’s film, ?
I’d say they’re on a par. I’d also suggest they’ve a lot in common. Both are epic.
Both are about humans journeying for years, cursed by forces beyond their control, and both end with homecomings.
Hubris, a grand return and the tension between myth and reality — it’s all there, in both stories, albeit thousands of years apart.
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Why? Because these are stories. Stories, we should all know and understand by now, are human creations. That is what defines them, sets them off in our imagination.
Who doesn’t know the Mayo one by now? It has ricocheted around the world at this point, pinging off international media sites and between world leaders like Mark Carney and Joe Biden.
And it’s easy to understand why. The story of the Mayo curse is universal and eternal.
As it goes, the last team to win, way back in 1951, were far too busy celebrating to show respect to a funeral on their return.
The priest, in his righteous anger, declared they wouldn’t be bringing Sam Maguire home again until all members of the ’51 team had died. The last player died in 2023.
Now, for the first time in 75 years, Sam is home.
Theirs is a story about a county in Ireland. It is about the GAA. It is also about the power of stories to capture the imagination.
The stories we tell ourselves determine how we move through the world. They can go against us or for us, but they are uniquely ours to create.
The curse the players carried was in their own hearts and minds. The story they told kept it there.
All stories relate to one another and so we see echoes of Mayo’s curse in .
When Odysseus disrespects the cyclops, his men believe a curse has been placed on them. They believe the mighty Poseidon, god of the sea, is punishing them on their voyage home to Ithaca.
But Nolan’s film is intent on being more than a story too.
It’s main project, as I experienced it, is to defend stories themselves, something he clearly believes to be under attack by AI and men like Elon Musk.
Does that sound a bit reductive? I mean, yes there’s the actual classical text to explore, but Nolan has been pretty straight forward about his artistic motives.
In a recent interview he spelled it out, saying “I think AI is a Trojan Horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside”.
Odysseus, played by the intensely likeable Matt Damon acknowledges that Troy should never have been sacked. He recognises himself as the bad guy.
“To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire,” he says.
Throughout, we are reminded that Zeus’s law is to be hospitable, to welcome beggars and strangers because they might be gods in disguise. Theirs is a society bound by honour and decency.
Odysseus accepts that by hiding in the Trojan Horse and performing such trickery against the Trojans, he destroyed everything.
He made a mockery of hospitality, Zeus’ law. He hid horror inside a gift, inside a peace offering. It was a foul thing to do.
His attack broke the “fragile bonds between men”.
It is clear that society before AI, one of letters, stories, and human imagination, is represented in this film by Troy.
Nolan wants us to see what is under threat. But the good news is that he also thinks, or at least promotes the idea, that stories are winning.
In plenty of interviews he discusses how people now recognise the slop of AI.
He says young people in particular are skeptical, and not willing to be as naive as the young man who presents the gift of the horse to the Trojans, truly believing it to be a gift.
Throughout this film Nolan reminds us that AI is not the gift it pretends to be. Rather, when it comes to the arts, it is a very dangerous attacker, intent on depriving us of what we hold most dear.
The suitors who throng the palace at Ithaca, most of them vile men, are shams and fraudsters.
They are not the same as Odysseus who is the real article — the worthy king. They kick old dogs and beggars because they believe worth is determined by usefulness.
It’s hard to imagine that people like Elon Musk are far from Nolan’s mind in his portrayal of these soulless men. Which is why it’s perfect that Musk is promising to provide an AI version of the story.
Poor Musk, he doesn’t seem to grasp the point. An AI story is not a story. His promise to make it historically accurate is also laughable.
This is a mythological tale with creatures that do not exist. There is a cyclops. A cyclops.
Nolan stands triumphant against Musk, buoyed by the ancient art of storytelling. He clearly relished the making of this film, his ode to humans.
It was shot all over, in locations as varied as Scotland, Morocco, Italy, and Iceland.
It was also shot with Imax cameras and without AI, making it as much a celebration of the natural world as a repudiation of the AI one. Even the giant cyclops is a mechanical puppet.
“I embrace new technology all the time, but it tends to be sold to people at the expense of systems that might still be valid and viable,” Nolan said.
“That’s what I saw in my industry — throwing the baby out with the bath water. We almost lost film.”
However, we didn’t. Audiences are not responding to AI in film as enthusiastically as they once did. Already, Nolan’s is smashing box office records.
Because it is human. It is us. Home in his film is not the main street in Mayo, but it might as well be.
Mayo’s story is beyond the reach of AI. It involves the heroic quests of ordinary people. True magic.
Shane Fitzgerald, The Mayo Bandit, collapsing to his knees near the steps of the Hogan Stand, mirrors the blind old man celebrating Odysseus’ return to Ithaca.
signals a broader homecoming too. It is Nolan’s audience coming back to stories, written and performed, and perfectly achieved, by humans.
Nolan’s film reminds us that creativity, the jewel of every civilisation, is now the site of an epic modern clash.
Earlier this week it was announced that hundreds of Irish writers would get to share millions in a €1.31bn case against AI giant Anthropic for copyright infringement.
But this is a small win in the context of a much bigger battle and an even bigger war.
Can we win? I certainly hope so. I also believe it is what we must continue to tell ourselves: stories have the power to save us, and AI will never have the power to replace us.
is Christopher Nolan taking the lead on that.
Stories will win, Elon. We’re coming home. Thanks to Nolan, this week at least, it feels like we already have.
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