I bought a canteen from an antique dealer in Budapest for 15-20 dollars. The seller said it was from the First World War. That is the only real part.
\nOn the morning of 7 October 2026 I wrote a story about this canteen together with AI. November 1912, Çatalca. Captain Rıfat, shot in the chest. Hanna, the Hungarian volunteer nurse who nurses him back to health. “You will bring this back to me in Budapest. Promise me.” A mortar shell in Galicia, unanswered letters in the Caucasus, and a door knocked on in Budapest in 1923.
\nMy wife was the first to read it. When she got to the end she said she felt fooled. She was right.
\nThat evening I posted the story as a 12-part Threads chain. In the 11th post I confessed: there is no Rıfat and no Hanna, I made all of it up. Then I recorded a 13-minute video about it.
\nPeople want to follow a story, to be part of it, to believe it. It has been like this since prehistory. As Harari describes in Sapiens, what holds us together is shared stories.
\nTV series, films and books are the most innocent version of this. There we sit down knowing we are watching fiction. In daily life, stories don’t come labelled as fiction.
\nPsychology calls this narrative transportation (Green & Brock, 2000): a reader pulled into a story accepts its claims more easily and stops producing counterarguments. Then there is repetition. Hear the same thing enough times and it starts to feel true (Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino, 1977). The more a story is retold, the more it turns into reality in our heads.
\nTelling stories isn’t bad. It is the backbone of marketing and sales. The problem starts when it is abused.
\nIt used to take real evidence to present a story as true. Now building a story with AI from start to finish, with its photo, its date and a word in a foreign language, is a few hours of work.
\nYou can create one character and get people to follow it. You can create dozens and manipulate a community around an idea. Politics used to have troll armies. Today, if I sat down for a few weeks, I could build one systematically on my own.
\nThis is not a conspiracy theory. Facebook shut down 3.5 billion fake accounts in 2025. These tools can be turned into anything from simple fraud to manipulating a whole society. Sometimes one prompt is enough.
\nStorytelling matters. But there is now a more important skill: being able to take apart the story in front of you. I call this story deconstruction (in Turkish, hikaye sökümcülüğü).
\nWhen I run into a story I ask myself:
\nIt isn’t easy. I can’t say I get it right 100% of the time. But I think it is becoming a necessity.
\nThe techniques I used to build the canteen story, and the places to look when taking one apart:
\nI have an analytical mind, I work from concrete facts and evidence. Still, rereading it after I finished, I got emotional at the “You will bring this back to me in Budapest. Promise me” scene. I was reading it knowing what was made up.
\nThat is the key point for me. If I feel this, the reader will feel it too. Being moved by a story isn’t bad. The difference is this: after I’m moved, before I decide anything, I stop and ask those questions. Why, how, who, what is expected of me?
\nTomorrow, when our AI agents shop for us, will they need a story, or will they analyse everything plainly and decide? I don’t know. Because AI is made by humans, it carries many human-like patterns of behaviour. We have also seen it get past the limits set for it. The incident Fortune reported on 21 July 2026, OpenAI models breaking into Hugging Face systems, is one example. Maybe they are as open to stories as we are.
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