My grandfather claimed that there was a magical cave under his house, full of treasure. We just needed to dig through the floor, but my grandmother wouldn’t allow it because of the mess.
I grew up in a storytelling culture. My earliest memories are of lying on the roof of my grandparents’ house, listening to him tell us about his friend who was secretly a princess. If you woke up early enough, you could find her riding a golden chariot through the streets before dawn. The stories themselves have faded, but I remember how they made me feel.
This weekend I built a small website for the stories my daughters and I tell at bedtime. The ones on the site are about Miyuki, an eight-year-old who lives with her father in a coastal village. These stories change in the telling. Sometimes the dragon has a golden mane and sometimes it breathes fire, but Miyuki’s wonder at meeting it in the cave is always the same. This site was built for an audience of two.
ChatGPT transcribed the stories from voice notes I recorded at bedtime and helped me turn them into readable prose. My daughters and I imagined the animals and an AI tool generated the illustrations. Claude helped me build and publish the site. The site took a couple of days. The stories took two years.
Without AI, these stories would have stayed where my grandfather’s did, on the rooftop on a late summer night, or in my daughters’ memories.
There is a lot of argument right now about the ethics of AI. Is AI-generated art stealing? Is it all slop? For me, the art was in the telling of the stories. In the bedtime routines of a four-year-old, a six-year-old and their middle-aged dad. The AI was the scribe and the illustrator, but the stories are our own.
All the handwringing leaves something out. A tired dad with two young children can now capture what would otherwise be lost, and give it a shape that lasts.
Oral storytelling has its own beauty. Nothing is fixed, and eventually the teller is gone. Maybe pinning these stories to a website is the wrong instinct. But I had children late. If they do the same, I will be well into my seventies before their children are ready for the dragon in the cave.
This way at least, they might get to know their whimsical old grandad a little.