A brief introduction to Intelligent Jello

From which one learns a little of the author, the publication, and the concept of AI necromancy.

My name is Mike Gioia and I’m already in trouble in my first post.

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 in movies. The themes of my coming-of-age have been: fascination with art, bureaucratic fatigue, ill-advised solo ventures, and redemption through interesting people and interesting work. I worked in TV writers rooms, independent film, and technology. Now I sorta work in all three designing and deploying AI systems.

But I’m not a short-sighted futurist. 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 were 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 through 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. I’ve made an AI village of 10,000 residents who journaled about their days. And I’ve performed AI necromancy, creating AI recreations of historical figures to be interviewed on TV.

Additionally, you can expect me to write some topography of the AI space. The map is being drawn in real time and I’m enthusiastically taking notes. It’s a noisy birth ward where people, ideas, and companies are emerging quickly. In addition to my hands-on work, I also organize events in the space occasionally, like AI film screenings and this annual AI film conference in Los Angeles.

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. Internet humor is driving a lot of the advancements. 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.