Kunal Tandon

Personal news…I’m going to be a studio head. Actually, I’m going to be a full stack studio. I might get really into it and become the next Disney. Just kidding, that’s probably not going to happen. At least not for me. But maybe it could happen for someone else in the future? I’m using a hyperbolic example to think through what the implications are of a lot of the exciting primitives being introduced in the AI world for others to create on top of.

I saw a tweet last week from a Dad saying his son put a prompt in GPT-3 about a character he made up, and a bedtime story was generated, and it was exciting that now they could create an entire series, with a new story to read every night. It was cool, and it got me thinking about a new age for fan fiction. I was going to write a post about that, but when I sat down to write it, and tried to find the tweet, instead I found a bunch of tweets about other parents doing the same with their kids.

There was a parent who went a step further, and leveraged Dall-E to help animate the story they were creating. They weren’t alone in that idea. My search quickly yielded an engineer who spun up a GPT-3 bedtime story generator with Dall-E illustrations. This feels small and huge all at once. My gears are turning.

Many people talk about creativity as the ability to hold onto the perspective and uninhibited imagination you have as a kid. Kids are constantly making up stories. They are constantly living in the impossible, because when you’re a kid, everything feels possible. I don’t know many kids who are going to sit down to write and illustrate a book that would be published. Things mostly live in their head. When they learn to write, in the early years they often lack the vocabulary to fully communicate everything in their minds. But these new primitives challenge all of what was once possible. New tools that allow people often in their most creative phase of life, to also begin to create with little to no friction. Could the next best selling children’s book author be a child? It doesn’t sound that crazy. It sounds possible. Maybe even inevitable.

Beyond children’s books, the idea of high quality personally created media is fascinating to imagine. What if I have some rough ideas for a fantasy sci-fi thriller. I probably won’t sit down to write the next great fantasy novel, but I will plug some stuff into GPT-3. Based on the trend line of how powerful these AI tools are becoming, and how high quality the outputs are, it begins to push our traditional thinking on what it means to produce creative work. What kind of creative talent gets unlocked when starting, and seeing the results of your ideas feels easy and almost instant. Momentum can be powerful.

There’s a lot more to unpack around this shift, but I have to write another post soon, and these posts are 100% human brain generated (for now), so I need to keep some insights for the next one. Stay tuned.