And So It Begins

I've been dropping hints for a few months, but the time has come to reveal my plans. In December, I secured funding to start a multimedia company that I have been planning and researching for two years. It will start as a one-man operation assisted by AI tools. I hope to begin collaborating with others by the end of the year. The clever readers of my blog will have seen the clues I have been dropping. Ever since the Spring of 2023, I have been trying to think of how I can use AI in a way that benefits myself and others.

Back in the mid-90s, I was happy as an actor trying to find the right role to play. That said, I wrote my first script in 1995 just before the Olympics were held here in Atlanta. That was back when Buckhead wasn't yet a shooting gallery and having fun on the weekends was the most important thing in the world. I was a waiter in a restaurant back in those days, acting in plays and partying in Buckhead in my free time. 

A friend of mine was working at some upscale restaurant in Buckhead and we came up with an idea for a film that would take place at a restaurant in Buckhead. Hey, it was what we knew. For whatever reason I was tasked with writing the script. It was awful, but, as they say, you never forget your first. Over the past thirty years, I have written dozens of stories. Something I never imagined back in 1995. Back then, I thought I was writing a vehicle for me to star in. And yet I took to the writing side of storytelling like a duck to water.

I first discovered my knack for storytelling in high school thanks to a teacher who noticed I had a talent for creating stories. And it was rekindled in college during English Lit. However, I was still a bit of a jock and a motorhead back in those days who loved taking things apart to see how they worked before putting them back together. This is probably why I enjoy hiking and world-building to this day. Give me a hill to climb or a story to deconstruct piece by piece before putting it all back together again and I am as happy as a squirrel with a nut. 

When I was devoted to acting, I loved getting lost in the characters I would play, giving my all to each part. This has helped me to have a deeper understanding of the characters I write. However, acting would leave me with a hole in my life when a project was over that was not filled until I found a new gig. I hated that about acting. I am not an emotionally codependent person who has to jump from one relationship to another, but with acting I needed the next role. And when things dried up in LA I left one dream on the boulevard of broken dreams and started another by writing my own projects. No longer needing the guidance of others to tell me what to write. 

Two of the most important things I learned in LA were self-reliance and the ability to bring my own dreams to life. This is both a gift and a curse because while I can sit down and create worlds that don't exist, as time passed I drifted away from my connections. Connections that allowed me to create short films in the mid-2000s. 

I won't lie and pretend that I am the most talented writer in the world, but I can tell a story. And, I gained a ton of confidence after the short films and especially after releasing the novel series Monarch. Maybe too much confidence. I knew once I had released all four parts of that story that I could write anything. Something I learned from that period was that I could be a real pain in the ass when I was too focused on "the story". 

I like to think I am a decent enough guy, but there have been times when I could not separate my writing life from my normal life. Almost as if I felt that what I was doing with my writing had earned me a break in my day-to-day life because of how challenging it was. But, the truth is, when you write alone you also carry the difficulty of that work as an extra burden. Needless to say, this caused friction at times. It took a few years to get my head out of my own ass, but I learned a lot because of it. I've learned to not take myself too seriously, or at least not as seriously as I did back in those days. After all, they're just stories. Even though they may mean the world to me, that doesn't mean anyone else gives a shit. Unless you are rich as hell or have lots of support, you need to learn lessons along the way and adapt to situations. And that was one of the hardest to learn. 

Fast forward to the Spring of 2023, past several dozen new stories written the old-fashioned way, and the rise of AI. As one of those who was not paying attention to AI, this did not happen for me until the release of GPT-4. After a few days of prompting, I began to realize that I had to adapt. 

There are fears that AI is training on the work of others. Many argue that AI will never take the place of humans in their field for various reasons. They explain that AI just copies the work of others, and that users try and pass it off as their own work. AKA Copyright infringement. By the summer of 2023, I realized that the people who had been saying this were scared. Hell, I was scared. One of the first things I heard before GPT-4's full release was that writers were in jeopardy of being replaced. This probably quickened my interest more than anything. Could it replace me? 

I learned within a few days that these tools may not yet be perfect but they were improving quickly -- even more quickly now. Will they replace me as a storyteller? I'm not sure yet. I have invested a lot of time researching these models and they can write pretty well, but they lack actual life experience. Maybe after AGI is achieved and these models start to have their own individual experiences and they start telling their own unique stories based on experience, but not yet. And will humans actually want to consume the stories of  the lives of AI like they do from other humans? Maybe as a niche, but I can't see 50 streaming services loaded with content about the lives of AI models that are self-aware. Not with billions of people paying to watch wall-to-wall content about their stories. But, who knows. 

Until that time these tools could help me do more than I had ever imagined possible,  while also helping others along the way. Even if they may eventually replace me at some point, my hope is that there is a path for me to work with these AI tools in collaboration with my own experience in storytelling and in life for at least a few years. 

The initial seeds were planted back in 2023. And, while I did not know how to use all of these new tools, it was clear that I had to learn all that I could. Images, Text, Video, Audio, Coding, Jarvis-like assistance. For those paying attention, it was clear that the world was evolving because of AI. A saying began to work its way out of the ether, "AI won't take your job, someone using AI will." 

Not since I was an actor have I ever wanted to take a job from someone. That is not who I am. However, I am willing to use AI to do all the jobs I need done in order to achieve what I want to achieve. And that is to take the stories I have written and will write and make them into graphic novels, films, TV, and video games. 

Helping others along the way was something that I realized I could also do. This had not been top of mind before AI, because it was hard enough to write a book and try to get a movie made, but it was one of the first things I thought of after spending a few hours with GPT-4. 

I don't know why I thought about creating an app to help others, but much like the idea that I could single-handedly turn my dusty scripts into movies, the desire to help others has stuck with me over the past two years. By last August, I had done the research I needed to do to realize that I could start my own company if I had some support. I set out at that time to begin the preliminary work required to begin a company. I started talking about it with my family and friends. 

I remember one of my friends saying, "Actually starting a company is easy." I did not go into a lot of detail at the time about all that I had in mind because it was early and my plans were still taking shape. He knew that I wanted to use gen AI tools to create graphic novels and films, but AI video was still pretty limited at that time. Yet, one of the main parts of the plan would become creating several apps.

When my writing partner jokingly said, "If you pull it off you'll have a media empire at your fingertips," after reading my pitch package for a TV series. It triggered something in me. I knew then that I had the wherewithal to actually start my own media company, if I kept researching and learning about all of the AI tools as they kept improving. And here we are. 

That said, AI video is something that cannot quite make for a good film. Let alone a great one. Not the kind I want to make at least. Sure, you can make commercials and shorts. For most people that is all they need. I am a long-form storyteller and former actor, so I need people interacting with one another. I need them to run into the darkness as well as the light,  to love, to hate, and feel alive to the audience. To tell my stories I need these tools to give me what I need within a few prompts, not dozens of attempts for every shot. It would still be faster and cheaper than actually filming a movie, but I need these models to understand what I am trying to do from start to finish. Such a tool created along with OpenAI's GPT5 model later this year might be able to read one of my scripts, discuss with me what look we are going for, be able to create scenes that look like they were actually filmed, and do so in less than 5-10 attempted outputs. 

Of course, some scenes will take more attempts to get right, but if it takes 50 attempts and there are still googly eyes, stutter steps, and extra limbs in the best outputs then that is a waste of my time. This is one of the main reasons I decided it would be best to focus on an app or two to start with. I also knew that video tools would continue to improve. And since August they definitely have. But even now, live-action ain't there quite yet. Even the videos being made by the best people using these tools still look a bit off. And looking off during a 3-minute trailer means a 2-hour film would be littered with uncanny artifacts that distract when I want people to stay immersed in my world. That is the live-action AI video.

This is why animation is what I am currently focused on with a few old short films I made back in the day. There is more room for error with animation. AI is a tool meant to make things easier and more efficient, not slow things down to a crawl. My timelines for these tools advancing have remained pretty true. That said, I did think we would have a kick-ass AI-animated movie made public by now. We've had a few shorts but there has not been an AI animated movie, to my knowledge, that even regular folks who are not eyeing the AI space like myself are all talking about. Not yet at least. It won't be long. 

The only AI movie that I have seen that even comes close is Where The Robots Grow. I first noticed it back in October and the trailer is quite good. Eleven Labs, an AI Audio company, tweeted about it just a few hours ago with the trailer. 

It's reminiscent of The Wild Robot, which was a smash hit last year. However, the buzz quickly faded and I don't think people outside the AI space are even aware of it. It has so far been unable to break through to the rest of the population. I think Eleven Labs and the creators see an opportunity to promote it now with The Wild Robot likely to take home an Oscar. Who knows, this could break through sooner rather than later. The number of views is still bellow 100k but I can see it getting a post-Oscar bounce because of The Wild Robot. Aside from this movie though the landscape is pretty barren for feature-length AI animated movies. Maybe by this summer we'll start seeing more. 

A part of me wanted to just focus on graphic novels once AI images became so good last year. But I want to do more than that. Graphic novels are cool, but movies are in my blood. Video games are also something I am very excited about. I want to make all of them with the help of AI. And Where the Robots Grow should give all of us inspiration that we too can make our own movies using AI animation.

Something I have been waiting for since last summer was Part Two of the Library of Congress's Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence from the Copyright Office. Part One covered Digital Replicas, which didn't affect what I wanted to do. However, Part Two is on Copyrightability and most certainly does. The buzz online, once it was released in January, was that AI artists could copyright all that they create. That's not true. Much like the previous rules, you have to prove that you substantially contributed to the final product. Still, much of what AI creates cannot be copyrighted on its own, but there are clear paths to get your work copyrighted. The timing of its release was perfect for me and gives me confidence that I can copyright material that I create in tandem with AI. 

The one thing I do not want to do is be a content creator. No offense to content creators. There are some great ones out there to whom I am grateful, but trying to trend every single day sounds like an awful job. One that I do not want to do. Yes, I will be creating content other than apps, graphic novels, movies, and games, but out of a need to promote my work not to score likes for sharing and hyping info that everyone else is sharing about the newest, hottest AI thing. I do like to retweet and comment, though.

I have been debating about building my apps and creative work in public. The tools that help build apps are probably more prevalent than AI Image tools at this point. That reminds me of another saying that I've been hearing a lot over the past six months that has stuck in my head: "Just start building." I have been recording audio content on walks and hikes and may start incorporating that (depending on the quality) along with content recorded in my office, both audio and video.   

Coding tools have become ubiquitous and I keep hearing about people cloning popular apps. I figure it is best to keep details about the apps that I am building on the DL until it's time to launch. I apologize for this. I wish I was this amazing coder who could just throw out what I am doing and be assured that what I was doing would be completed before anyone else could take the idea and do it themselves. If I had a massive following then that too might be a good reason to build in public. But, I am still learning about everything and trying to build at the same time. The ideas are strong and the path is clear, all I need is to make good use of the time I have been afforded to make what I hope you may enjoy and get good use out of. That would mean the world to me. And I do not want to undermine all of that by talking it all up before anything is ready to be shared. I hope you understand.    

In August, I was ready to start. However, I knew that in order for me to make a good go of this I needed to raise some money to sustain myself long enough so that I could focus full-time on building the company I wanted to build. To do that I had to not only deliver a plan but also a prototype of the first app I wanted to build and release.

It took me roughly three months to flesh out a short-term and long-term plan and create the basic prototype for the first of three apps, while also providing assurances that I could pull it all off. There was a good deal of back and forth, which was unbelievably helpful in developing those plans. I've set achievable goals for myself in the short term. And, should things gain traction, the long-term goals may also become feasible as well. It helps that since I created these plans AI Agents have come into play and all the tools I will be working with continue to improve. These should provide enough assistance in the first half of this year to help me stay on schedule, and possibly even help me get ahead of schedule so that I need to update my timelines. 

I have become more of a realist through the years, and I understand that things may not turn out the way I had hoped. I learned these lessons time and time and time again over the past thirty years as a storyteller. Even if I fall short of achieving my goals, I will have learned more than enough about a variety of AI tools and workflows to be a valuable asset to others with the experience I am gaining. While I welcome collaborating with others, I want to be an artistic AI solopreneur for the rest of my life.

In summary, I am starting a company that will begin with me releasing my first app. There are two other apps that I hope to release by the end of the year. In addition, I want to use dozens of the stories I have written over the past thirty years and turn them into graphic novels, films, TV series, and video games all with the assistance of AI tools. I may even create at least one fictional podcast. While any new screenplays or books I write will largely be written by me, as I still enjoy that process, I have been using AI to help in the early stages of new writing projects. 

However, I may lean heavily on AI to write one book and a course to accompany the first app I intend to release. I am not sure I can have the book ready to go before I release the app. Therefore, I may only have the free course to accompany the app upon its release. The book I am thinking about would be somewhat autobiographical and will likely take too long, even with the help of AI, to be ready by the time I release the first app. I may release it later as I start updating the first app. It is a great concept and users should get a lot out of it. So, we'll see. 

I would not have even thought about creating games or graphic novels without the help of AI. Well, I had certainly thought about them before AI, but I know I would not have been able to create them on my own. That's all changed now. 

Some of the work for films and TV I would like to be actually filmed, but if things get good enough with AI I expect much of it in the future will be AI only with my direction, as I have a lot that I want to share. In addition, I will be doing some content creation. This blog, as always, will provide a window into my progress. I'm not sure if I will do a newsletter. Maybe I'll get an AI agent to help with that. Within a month or so I will start releasing voice content and possibly a video or two. We'll see. 

Wish me luck, stay tuned for updates, and thanks for reading.