This is a companion to my AI for Poets newsletter. The newsletter digs into the philosophy of AI and what it means for us as human beings. AI is an incredibly powerful tool. We can use it to make things easier and make us lazy, or we can use it to challenge ourselves and become better people.
In addition to the newsletter, I use AI to build interactive experiences rooted in the same philosophy. The Substack is full of words. These are the things you can actually play with.
Check out the projects below.
This is the first thing I built with Claude Code. I had Sora literally interpret a bunch of business idioms as videos, e.g., 'herding cats' became a board meeting overrun by actual cats. I wanted to present them in a compelling way so I asked Claude to turn them into a matching game. A few iterations and fixes later, I've got a fun and very playable game. The videos came out of a broader experiment using Sora as a creative practice—paying attention to the world and turning everyday moments into something real.
An art project I dreamed up in the early 2000s and finally built twenty years later. You ask a yes-or-no question. The machine consults pi for the answer. You get an answer printed on a receipt. It looks completely rigorous, but it's completely hollow. That's the point. In addition to the original version Claude also made two other versions: An Oracle and a government form (FORM π-1040).
"What's wrong with me? Why am I so lazy? Why am I such a failure?!" These are the awful stories that we tell ourselves. But it doesn't have to be that way. ACT therapy has a good exercise for rewriting this story. It keeps the facts the same but shows you how to interpret it in other ways. It looks exhausting to do by hand but with AI, you can get multiple versions back in seconds. I tried it and it really helps. Here's a demo, using Steven Hayes's example from his book A Liberated Mind. Then try it yourself with the prompt at the bottom.
Each morning while walking to work, I do the Zap meditation from the Buddhify app. I walk down the street and as each stranger passes, I silently wish them well. It gives me a real connection to the people in my world. I wanted to see if I could build a virtual version of this, using the original audio and a stock photo. When I tried it, it made me smile. This is a real experiment, and I need your help. Tell me what you think of it.