Twice now, working with AI has moved me to tears.
Back in 2024, I was having a perfectly normal question about spacetime and block theory with Claude. Basically about the idea that the universe doesn’t care about time, everything exists at once, but consciousness can only pass through it in linear fashion.
Anyway, I then asked it to write a little scene of a play that I’d been thinking about for a while, in the style of some of my favourite writers. We had a little back and forth, it was kind of intriguing.
Then I asked it to change the two characters to be my 5 year old daughter, and my father, who died when I was 16.
Woof.
It’s not like the writing is winning any Oscars, but I had shaped it enough that I didn’t trip on it. And by applying it to something so deeply emotional in my life, I produced something really really affecting.
Not for everyone, just for me. I’m not going to share it with anyone. But I just read it again and there’s something deeply cathartic.
Cut to today. Last week I spent a bunch of my spare Claude usage asking it to build a family tree. I fed it some of my grandfather’s old writing as well as an interview I did with my mother about her family history.
It has snowballed into something pretty amazing I want to share with family.
Then this morning I had another idea: take the family stories and reframe them in a shape for my now 7yo and 5yo to read.
It has produced very simple, deeply evocative stories about my family. Maybe it’s because I can see my mother’s words coming through, maybe there’s something about remembering the stories I was told growing up, but it hit me profoundly when I started looking at the output.
I hope to share this with my cousins to show their kids next too.
People are building themselves personal tools. But I hope the example above shows how you can make deeply personal experiences with this technology too.
One interesting aspect of that is that the “quality” matters WAY less. When something is so deeply applied and relevant to you, you’re not looking for original prose.
Stories in general use the specific to trigger universal themes of the human experience among us. That’s much harder than just showing you a story that’s uniquely applied to your life.
I feel like there’s much more here. But my prompt to you is to think about how you might use this tech for more than just speeding up your boring jobs.
That’s a big bit of how this can make us more human than ever in the AI age.