I’ve probably never finished any creative story I’ve started, whether in my head or in any real way. I’ve written short stories, songs, poems (including notebooks of rap lyrics believe it or not), stand-up routines, short plays, etc. but none of them ever really finished the story I had in mind when I set out. I lose interest, doubt myself, or just give up for some other reason that I wasn’t able to admit to myself then. But I needed to tell this story, and I doubted I would finish this one anyway, yet I still started. To tell this story and to learn more about genAI, I built a fake and impossible radio station using AI for the music, the audio, and toward the end entire scripts. If you do listen, you may notice things change from time to time, as what I learned about AI changed the way I was able to tell the story, and how to use the tools at my disposal.
The Dimming is the story of a fictional town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, experiencing its last flickers of life and light. Of a town that didn’t want to be forgotten and called Cass (yes, that Cass) to be its lighthouse keeper. But Cass also runs a mobile pirate radio station from her sprinter van; as she could never stay in one place for very long, Dimming called her to tend to its light, and maybe even prevent it from dimming away into darkness. Just like so many rural communities in America, Dimming is barely holding on to history, purpose, people, and existence. This is the story of all of us who, as kids, couldn’t wait to leave the one-road town that we called home, and now wish we would have appreciated it for what it was.
The whole thing was built with AI: Suno for the music, ElevenLabs for Cass’s voice, ChatGPT for storyboarding and scripts, Midjourney for the images, Claude for the production pipeline, and Git Bash for audio processing and video rendering. The product is real, but the process was the point. LLMs will never have an imagination, so I’m better off using my own.
Thanks for listening or reading about The Dimming, 108.1 FM.