AI Videos

Twelve lessons, twelve hosts, each episode built around a different writer, poet, critic or philosopher explaining one piece of the craft of writing. Nobody signed a release, obviously. Everyone was generated.

The first experiments were rough. Faces drifted, voices felt hollow, and it took a while to find a version of "AI-hosted" that didn't feel like a gimmick. Once the pipeline settled, the episodes found their own rhythm, and once in a while we let the experiments run further than the brief: in one episode, Aristotle drives through the Greek countryside in a beaten-up Volvo 240. It works better than it sounds like it should.

Each host got a setting that argued for itself instead of just narrating over a plain backdrop:

• Gogol — part of his lesson is staged inside his own Dead Souls. The recognisable setting pulls the point of the lesson into the story itself: Gogol is literally talking to his own character, which is also how he reveals and creates him.
• Mayakovsky — placed in locations that were genuinely his: an agitprop train, the "carriage of communism," moving people from villages into cities, Mayakovsky riding the same wave as the propaganda he wrote; and inside Narkomfin, the first communal house, whose brutal, avant-garde minimalism sits next to his own persona as two enormous, matching forces — Narkomfin was built while Mayakovsky was still alive.
• Chekhov — hosts his lesson at his own dacha in Yalta.
• Aristotle — reimagined as a modern-day philosopher and psychologist, which, arguably, is exactly what he'd be if he existed today. Hence the Volvo.

Some cuts could have been louder, more dynamic, more "made for the algorithm." We chose not to go there. The subject was academic writing — the tone had to stay academic too, Volvo and all.

Twelve episodes, one recurring question underneath all of them: how far can an AI-hosted format go before it stops being believable, and how far can it go before it stops being interesting?

Tools: GPT Image, Nano Banana, Kling 3.0, HeyGen, ElevenLabs