“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
—Winnie the Pooh
These posts are me Thinking of Things. Please feel free to share your Thoughts in Comments below. Let’s see what we see.
Recent Posts
An AI conversation about Conversation
Do you talk to your AI assistant much? I mean, talk out loud, using speech mode for both input and output? I generally use voice when I’m asking a quick question, like what temperature to cook sausages in the oven, or why my boiler pressure has plummeted. At Meta, I worked on real time voice…
The C Word
When I proposed at the end of last week’s blog that I was going to post next about the c-word in storytelling, I was planning to write about the Latin word cum which, even if your memory of long-ago Latin classes is as addled as mine, you’ll know means “with,” as in the phrase summa cum laude — “highest…
A man of many faces.
Who am I going to be next? Meet Matthias Klee from the free city of Nuremberg. A 17th Century maker of mechanical curiosities… and my historical doppelganger. At least according to a remarkable time traveller called The Face Tracer. It’s a GPT I’ve built that is at once an experimental plaything and a metaphorical mirror…
“Show Your Workings”: An old idea that might help solve new problems AI is creating in the classroom.
When I was a kid, I was pretty good at maths. I could do quite complex calculations in my head, visualising the numbers. But at school, my teacher Mr. Cutcliffe (who went by the nickname Sigi for reasons I never quite understood) would get annoyed with me, even though I provided the correct answers. Sigi…
Building Quantum Teapot: What I Learned From Watching People Get Lost in my AI Storyworld
When I released Quantum Teapot a few weeks ago, I invited friends, family, and a few adventurous strangers to test it. I wanted to see how people would navigate a multi-character AI storyworld, what patterns would emerge, and where my design choices would hold or break down. Over the past few weeks, I’ve collected some of their…
Welcome to the strange town of ‘Quantum Teapot’, population… negotiable.
I’ve been conducting a new narrative exploration, and I’d like to share it with you. Over the last couple of years, I have built literally hundreds of AI characters, both as part of my work at Meta and for my own creative explorations in storytelling. I’ve also been involved in efforts to combine AI characters…
I Know What They Want (And That’s the Problem)
Is ‘helpful’ ever actually useful when it comes to storytelling? “I know what they want, and I know how to give it to them.” I have been much mocked in my family over many years after recounting a strange dream I had one night early in my filmmaking career. This…
The Loop of One: AI and the Joy of Private Creativity
What if making something is just as valid when the only audience is you? We don’t usually think of creativity that way. For centuries, making has been tethered to sharing—paintings for galleries, scripts for producers, songs for listeners. But much of human creativity has always been private: a doodle in…
Horses for Courses
How to ride to the AI Frontier I fell off a horse called Cuddles when I was six and took this as a cosmic sign that I should never attempt equestrian pursuits again. So when I say that prompting AI models is like riding a horse, I’m speaking entirely metaphorically—though…
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Polarity Reversal 