So, last week I left off with the notion of what else I was doing with AI. I created a lot of videos with AI as of late. Here’s some previews of what the students at my school are going to be seeing soon when we talk about our Four Pillars as part of the orientation process.

Video is fun, but feels a bit hollow in the end. I’m going to have to have a good use case for it in the future in order to use it regularly. Bottom line is that there is no way in the world that I would be able to do such a thing before this moment in history. There are levels of special effects in here that it would take teams of hundreds to make and millions of dollars. I made this all by myself over the span of a couple of hours this week. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

But as I said, that’s not my focus. What I’ve actually been working on with AI is coding. My good friend, Chris, inspired me to get to work. He has been creating things with AI coding quite a bit lately and every time he would send me something that he was excited about, I would look at and think, What would I do with that? But I never had time to figure out what, exactly, I should do.

This summer, I was sitting around at my daughter’s house and I thought, “Why don’t I create an app for my filmmaking course?” I’ve been a teacher for a very long time and I have a ton of material that I’ve created over the years to work with, so why not encase it all in some kind of system where I can serve that up, not just to my students, but students at other schools as well.

So, I started building a site. You can find it here, but you can’t login to it. You might run into some errors there, but it should be working. That’s where my class sits at the moment. I’m not sure I’ll be using it with students yet, but it’s there, ready to go.

It took me a while to build the infrastructure of the site, and quite frankly, that’s what I’m still working on. I’ll be able to grade, come up with lessons, track student progress, and respond to writing, all there. It connects to my Google Classroom and Google Calendar and can update things as needed. And I built it all from scratch.

But I wanted to see what else I could build. One of the things my students always have questions about is screenwriting apps. There are many screenwriting apps out there, but how does one get to them? They are almost always paid apps.

I decided to build a free one for my students, and over the course of about two hours, I managed to build an open-sourced screenwriting app that writes in Fountain, exports pdfs, and even has an AI assistant that only asks questions to help students write their scripts. It’s amazing. I had to become an Apple Developer in order to make that happen, but it works and works well. No more paying for screenwriting apps for THIS young man! And no more for my students either (it’s also a journaling app that gives you a daily prompt…if you want a copy for yourself, just reply to this email and I’ll give you a link for installation on a Mac).

Still, that wasn’t enough for me. Most of my students are currently obsessed with the website Letterboxd at the moment, where they go in to rate movies and write reviews. I thought, Why not create a Letterboxd for my own classes? So, I did! Now, we have a working movie review site, where students can post their reviews and respond to other reviews. It pulls the movie posters and information along with it.

All of this is pretty darned neat! And all of it is something that I could never have done a year ago. I did it all through conversing with Claude in a chat. I am currently rebuilding my website so that I am no longer hosted with Google and have more control over things.

All of these are long processes and definitely not for the faint of heart. Poor Tracey has been ignored for a couple of weeks now as I sit in front of my laptop vibe-coding! (I hate that term). The problem here is that I’m really enjoying myself and what I’m doing with all of this. Projects that I’ve wanted/needed to do for years are now just a couple of hours of my life. It’s making me incredibly efficient for the things that I need to do.

So, the bottom line with everything is that I’m torn on AI. It’s opening up entirely new worlds for me and I am really enjoying what I’m making. At the same time, I see a generation of kids who are using AI and it is closing off worlds for them. They don’t know what they don’t know. AI isn’t a way for them to express themselves; it’s a means to an end. It’s a way for them to do as little work as possible to get things done rather than figuring out ways to express themselves.

I saw an article once that said that people shouldn’t be allowed to use AI before the age of 40, and I kind of agree with that. I am a person who has the self-discipline and creativity to make things using these programs. But how many people in the world are like me? How many people would spend afternoons talking to Claude to code the things that they dream about? How many people would have the patience to talk to the AI to get it to produce the videos that they wanted, and then be willing to do something about it? These are not things I’m bragging about. It’s not good for me to sit and vibe-code all afternoon (though it is 116 degree F outside right now, so it’s not like I can go on a hike). But I’m enjoying myself.

What happens when whatever you dream about, you can make?

We’re about to find out…on a large scale. And it’s both frightening and exhilarating at the same time.