tape.deck: A Medium-Independent Authoring & Composition Tool

It’s difficult to describe the process behind using AI to build a tool that you don’t quite know what it is, but now that you have the ability to do it, you’re compelled to continue and to find out. These things sometimes take time to reveal themselves though, and I think I’m starting to understand what this one is and how it functions, out of the other bits and bobs I’ve managed to piece together of the “grand idea” (more of an intuition) that is fueling the whole thing. For now, it’s called tape.deck. Here’s a faux diagram that I got ChatGPT to make, and I think grounding it in a physicalization really helps for comprehension: The idea in a nutshell is this: Generative AI makes it possible to realize the same composition in many forms. This calls for tools that let authors shape a story’s underlying structure and guide how it becomes text, images, audio, or video. After much back and forth, I managed to coax a pretty coherent simple specification for what this…