This site is devoted to an experiment with generative AI and its potential uses for creators like me. I’m a teacher, writer, and game designer. I’m not an artist or a musician or a videographer or a coder. This site is a place to explore AI through the lens of a story I wrote and that I care about a great deal. It’s a story I created with the help of human collaborators. I want to see if AI Collaborators (in every sense of the phrase) can add anything I find compelling and worthwhile. What can I do with AI that I couldn’t do on my own?
In 2017 I wrote the first and second drafts of a haunted house novel called Chimera House. I loved the concept I came up with and had a lot of fun writing the book. Around the same time I started teaching full time at Ringling College of Art and Design and my attention shifted to all sorts of other rewarding and time-consuming pursuits and obligations. I worked on games, co-wrote Writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Horror for Dummies, and helped build Ringling’s new Creative Writing major.
In 2022 I began experimenting with generative AI tools like Chat GPT and Midjourney. I quickly came to believe that AI was going to have a profound impact on society and particularly on the artistic pursuits of the students and faculty at Ringling College. In 2023 I helped form an AI Task Force at the College to help all of us navigate the exciting/terrifying new landscape of AI generated media. I now teach classes on AI and work with my colleagues to help try and figure out how to move forward in the face of unsettling change.
I have found that while AI tools have a lot of potential, it’s hard to realize that potential if you’re not trying to accomplish a real goal with them. I thought back to Chimera House (as I did every few months) and decided that it would serve as a wonderful base text from which to explore AI. No AI tools were used in the writing, editing, illustrating, or design of Chimera House aside from long-accepted tools like spellcheck and Adobe Photoshop (no generative fill) and Illustrator. I wanted an AI-free foundation on which to test AI’s limits and capabilities.
This site will house new content created to expand the story of the Chimera House novel. I hope that my audience enjoys the book on its own and also takes some pleasure from whatever AI and I come up with for this site. I know a lot of people have very serious, well-grounded ethical, moral, and legal concerns about AI. I do too. I also believe it’s here to stay and that as an educator and a creator, I need to understand it.