Summary: Not all digital content is made with storytelling in mind. Sometimes, what’s handed to you is just technical language, system output, or error codes—and none of that carries a “main story” in the way people expect. So what happens when a machine gives you a JSON error message, and someone tells you to find the story? This post looks straight at that problem, why it matters, and what it reveals about the way humans and systems are misaligned—especially in content marketing and AI-assisted workflows.
The Setup: What Happens When There’s Nothing to Rewrite?
In the prompt referenced, we encounter a common situation: someone feeds an error message to a rewriting tool—likely AI-based—and asks for the “main story” to be extracted and rewritten. But the input isn’t narrative at all. It’s a raw JSON response, basically machine-speak, reporting an error about an “insufficient account balance.” That’s it. No human character, no development, no arc, no context. Just code and a problem. And yet, someone still expects a story to come out of it.
Now ask yourself: why would anyone expect that? What need is driving people to take raw, transactional outputs and project meaning onto them? Where’s the miscommunication happening—and between whom?
We’re living in a time where we want machines to be storytellers, and we expect tools to convert gibberish into guidance. That’s not a complaint. It’s actually a legitimate dream—as long as both sides understand the rules of engagement.
The Input Is Not Broken—The Expectations Are
Let’s unpack this specific input: it’s a structured JSON snippet which fundamentally exists to communicate a state between machine systems. In this case, it’s saying: “This operation failed because the account has insufficient funds.” That’s perfectly useful for a developer or system integrator. It’s not meant for storytelling, because it isn’t meant for humans outside the chain of automation. It’s like demanding poetry from your refrigerator because the ice maker didn’t work.
The problem isn’t the input. The problem is when human-facing teams try to use machine-facing outputs without translation or reinterpretation. This disconnect happens in software companies, support teams, marketing workflows, and yes—AI tools. What does that say about the process we’re building for content creation? Are people following instructions, or are they just testing how far the machine will go before throwing up its hands?
The Real Story: Misalignment Between Technical and Human Communication
Now here’s where the actual story lives: not inside the JSON block, but around it. There’s a pattern forming here that points to a misalignment between technical content and human storytelling. We’ve built powerful machine tools that can riff on Shakespeare or simulate empathy, but too often, the prompt they receive doesn’t match the context they’re supposed to operate in.
This misalignment costs businesses real time and money. Developers think in branches and trees. Writers think in arcs and stakes. Marketers think in value and transformation. And customers think in problems and relief. If those layers are not clearly separated and translated between teams and tools, most efforts either waste resources or produce output no one is willing to sign off on.
Let me repeat that: the story here is not the JSON error code. It’s what that error says about organizational clarity and communication process. Who asked for a rewrite? Why did they think the input was usable? Who made the decision about “meaning” without reading the format?
When Artificial Intelligence Meets Real-World Miscommunication
Artificial intelligence isn’t magic. It’s engineering. Language models like those built by OpenAI are extremely good at correlation and form-matching—they approximate meaning based on countless examples. But they are not divine interpreters of nonsense. When the input is non-narrative, and the instruction is “Find the story,” you’re basically asking a software tool to hallucinate—not to assist.
How does this happen? Most likely, someone assumed that the incoming text—regardless of format—could be repurposed, rebranded, dressed in storytelling clothes, and pushed out again. But if the input is literally designed to report failure, there’s nothing to say until someone rewrites the message with an audience in mind. No character, no context, no narrative stakes means no real rewrite.
That doesn’t mean no value. It just means the first step isn’t rewriting—it’s diagnosis. Who said this was ready for storytelling, and what did they want the audience to understand or feel?
The Business Lesson: Clarity Is the First Story You Must Write
Here’s the real takeaway if you lead a marketing team, work inside product communications, or are building AI workflows: clarity is not optional. Getting “a story” from data requires more than machine learning—it requires intention. That means building mechanisms into your process that ask: Who is this for? What do they need to feel? Where does this data sit in the bigger picture of human experience?
Without context, even the best algorithm gives up. Just like a good negotiator never answers a bad question without reframing it first, you must teach your system—and your team—to start with understanding before asking for output. Diagnostic honesty comes first, then creative action second. Storytelling only works when there’s clarity about the problem and purpose.
Conclusion: There Was No Story—Until We Noticed Why
You asked for a rewrite. The machine looked at a machine message—an error saying “Not enough money in the account”—and said, “There’s nothing here to rewrite.” That wasn’t a bug. That was a breakthrough. Because what the machine told us was what many teams don’t want to hear: this content isn’t ready. Not until you define a real human need behind it. That moment of resistance? That’s where the real story begins.
The next time your team pushes structured system output into a “content reactor” and expects story soup on the other side, pause. Ask: Whose problem are we solving with this message? What emotion is being triggered? Which stake is being raised? Start with clarity. Then write for meaning. Anything else is pretending to communicate.
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Featured Image courtesy of Unsplash and Marija Zaric (uJodPIJ_Hl4)
