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.
It's amazing how much fun it is to make art with kids' toys. I had a Spirograph as a kid, two little toothed pieces you spin around each other, and out come these really cool images. Jackson Pollock was doing something like that when he threw paint at a canvas on the floor, except he was a real artist and knew what he was doing. But what if I could be like Jackson Pollock, just throwing paint on a canvas? That is what I tried to do here. Fling gives you the can and the floor. Splatter Booth fires paint across a gap at a spinning disc. And Spirograph is the toy itself, gears and all, running in a browser.
In 1935 Marcel Duchamp did an early version of 3D art. He rented a booth at the Concours Lépine, the Paris inventors' fair, and sold twelve spinning cardboard discs you could put on a phonograph turntable at 33⅓ rpm. A lantern inflates, a balloon rises, a fish circles its bowl. He sold almost none. I saw them at MoMA and made my own, all twelve redrawn from surviving prints, each on its own turntable that runs from 0 to 66 rpm. Mine are not perfect, but you can push the speed around and stare as long as you like, and that gives you a much better understanding of the 3-D effect than actually seeing them at the museum.
In the late 1990s I sat in a hall in Aspen and watched a young John Maeda present something he called Reactive Books. In one of them the letters bolted off the page and chased your mouse around the screen. MoMA has the books in its permanent collection, but each one shipped with a disc written for Macintoshes nobody has anymore, so what survives is the packaging and not the art. I rebuilt the idea from scratch with Claude. Seven typographic studies, each one running the same printer's pangram through a different physical process: heat and cold, a blade, pressure, magnets, erosion, melting, and ink bleeding across wet paper.
Here's something I made to help me unhook from negative thoughts. It's for when a thought stops feeling like a thought and starts feeling like the plain truth about you, ordering you around like it's in charge. This app lets you sit with one of those thoughts and push it around a little. Once you see it's only a thought, it stops running the show.
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.
"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.
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).
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.