Do you ever feel a sense of satisfaction watching a movie? I'm thinking of scenarios like when the bad guy is finally defeated or the hero achieves their goal.
I think with a book or movie, a lot of the emotional reaction actually comes from the work of the human that created it. You can feel the emotion of the creator and the story they set out to tell and have some connection with them. You make a good point about how we've always been able to emotionally connect with fiction, but low effort AI does feel different.
What causes the emotional reaction in a film is moving images in front of you in sync with sound. Further, even the simplest of movies is the product of more than one person with more than one emotional state. What causes the emotional reaction in a book is you reading and understanding what text is in front of you. The emotional reaction can happen in the radical absence of the author and in total contravention of their alleged will!
