Infinite Stories
Theoretical Future News
January 5, 2027
There is only one item at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show that I wanted to see that’s Shakespearean Monkeys’s* “Auryn”. For those of you living under a rock for the last few years, Shakespearean Monkeys is the development team behind “Campfire (Imagination Empowered)” the online story generation tool. Auryn takes the same large language models and image generation tools that have already been used to create over a billion pages of story and packages it into a handheld device.
Built to look like a child sized bound book, Auryn gives a sense of age that so many devices at CES try to avoid. Small patterns on the surface hide multi-colored lights that gently glow, sometimes forming words and images that evoke a sense of enchantment. Moving my hand closer to Auryn causes it to buzz warmly, almost like a house cat excited for head scratches. The light show gently guides me to open the book and see what’s inside.
Unfortunately, that’s where the obvious magic seemed to end. The inside of the book is two tablets that if you squint seem to be able to look like either a single screen or two separate ones. The interaction felt very similar to what I’ve experienced using the “Campfire” app with my kids. A collection of options appeared, including reading old stories that were already written, create a new story from pre-selected prompts, collaborate on a story, etc…
When the representative for Shakespearean Monkeys saw my reaction they had their speech ready, and I will say this is what blew me out of the water.
“Remember that this is a prototype and we wanted to have one available that could work all of the time for all of our users. As a result the screen isn’t quite what we aim to put into production. But I want you to forget about that and check the device’s settings.”
I did as I was prompted and it took me a moment to realize what they meant. There wasn’t any internet connection, no wifi, no Bluetooth, nothing. This device was completely offline.
When I told the representative that I noticed the networking issue, they responded “The network is off for a reason, because we want to show everyone that Auryn, unlike Campfire, is totally stand alone, no other computer or cloud service is needed for users to make their own story. We built Auryn from the ground up to give our users complete control of how their story gets made and shared. Unlike our competitors any changes to privacy protections around the world will have no impact on a family’s ability to create.”
It was then that the magic returned, in my hand was a neural network that could allow anyone to create a new story, to keep it as private or make as public as they wanted to.
Back to the present
This idea came up a few weeks ago while talking to my brother about ChatGPT and DAllE and imagining future uses. While I personally think many tech-bro types are overly gung-ho on what the current versions of large language models and image generators can do, I do think there will be some cool creations.
I like the idea of a story telling assistant that can help users write a story that otherwise might not get written. With the right combination of tools it’s not too crazy to imagine a service where users provide prompts for a story and a machine helps them get started on that story. Visuals to accompany the story could readily be made by another system reading the story/interacting with users to make sure the correct aesthetic is achieved.
Now the ethical concerns are non-trivial, with whose copyrights might be impacted/used to train the system. The Dr Seuss Estate isn’t going to be happy if a software company makes money from parody versions of the Cat in the Hat.
If I was doing this idea as a business, I think a combination of public domain data and opt-in volunteered training sets could do more than enough to make a program that would allow folks to be more empowered story tellers. While models made from truly public domain visuals and voluntarily shared materials wouldn’t have the same depth as systems like Dall-E, it would at least provide a starting point for aspiring authors.
*originally I wanted to use the name infinite monkeys but someone had already actually used that, while Shakespearean Monkeys didn’t actually come up as an existing business.