About

My name is Mike Gioia and I’m already in trouble in my own about section. I don’t have a pithy explanation of my life. It’s been active, disparate, and not at all like the coming-of-age stories I saw on television. To generalize my own coming-of-age story, the themes have been: fascination with art, bureaucratic fatigue, ill-advised solo ventures, redemption by interesting people and interesting work. I worked in TV writers rooms, independent film, and technology. Now I sorta work in all three of those designing AI systems.

I like the past. I’m indebted to a lot of dead people who took the time to write. I’m also excited about the future. Specifically, I’m quite excited about generative AI and what it means for normal people. I anticipate AI tools will let more people execute on more ideas with far less resources required. This point-of-view is largely informed by my time in Hollywood, where ideas are too expensive to execute alone. A very select group of people get the studio-backed assistance necessary to produce their ideas, while the majority of ideas sit unfunded in people’s heads. I saw valiant efforts to get these ideas out of heads in the indie film space, but they were all too often compromised due to prohibitive costs.

So I’m excited about generative AI’s potential to enable artistic people. That’s what I will write about here. Generative AI is the coolest development to happen in my life and I’m lucky to be involved in it with two companies and a lot of contract work. I focus on real-world use cases of generative AI in creative work. “Real-world” is a funny word to use because a lot of what I do feels like sci-fi. For one project I made an AI village of 10,000 residents who journaled about their day to provide focus group data. Another project called for some AI necromancy, designing AI recreations of famous dead people to be interviewed on TV.

Additionally, you can expect some topography of the AI space. The map is being drawn in real time and I’m enthusiastically taking notes. Because the space is young, there’s a lot of mobility. It’s a noisy birth ward where people, ideas, and companies emerge quickly. I frequent a lot of subreddits, discord servers, and parties. I also organize events in the space occasionally, like this annual AI film conference and this AI film screening.

I’ll mention that I think a lot of what’s going on is… just plain funny. There’s an absurdity to the space you would be foolish to ignore. A lot of the advancements are being driven by humor. You have to laugh at a lot of what’s happening to get it. So expect a little levity.

Oh, and why Intelligent Jello? That will be this blog’s most tightly kept secret. But feel free to guess.

And there you have it. That’s me, my blog, and my big ideas. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.

Where else to find the author online

You can find me on Twitter here. On Instagram here. You can follow my AI media company Late Arrivals on Instagram here. I’m sure you can find my email somewhere, but that place is not here.