Why We Trust AI With Our Tax Returns but Not Our Stories

Every tax season, millions of people file their returns. These days, AI reads the receipts, finds the deductions, and fills in the forms. Almost nobody says, “I’m offended that a machine wrote my tax return.” If anything, they’re grateful.

But when a short film made with the same kind of technology is released, the mood shifts. The comments fill up with “It has no soul,” “This is disgusting,” “Why does this even exist?” Coca-Cola’s AI-generated remake of its holiday ad in 2024 is a classic example. Some people criticized the visuals or the direction, but the core complaint was simply that AI made it.

The technology is the same. In both cases, a language or generative model produces something in place of a person. The difference isn’t the technology. It’s where the technology is placed.

Here’s my hypothesis:

People accept AI doing work. What they can’t accept is AI making stories. The moment AI touches narrative, people stop seeing it as a tool and start seeing it as a threat.

What separates a tax return from a novel

A tax return has a right answer. If the numbers are correct, it’s a good return. If they’re wrong, it’s a bad one. Who prepared it doesn’t matter. Whether it was an accountant, you, or an AI, the value of the result is the same.

Stories are different. In a novel, a film, or an essay, “who is speaking” isn’t information that sits outside the work. It’s part of the meaning. A war novel written by someone who lived through war reads differently from the same sentences written by someone else. When we read a story, we don’t just read the words. We read the experience and intent of the person behind them.

That makes a story less like a “deliverable” and more like testimony. And testimony requires a witness. AI-generated stories feel uncomfortable not because the sentences are bad, but because we know there’s no witness behind them.