Brave New Worlds: Lore Machine founder on putting writers at the top of the content chain with Generative AI

Published in Realscreen April 2024

We all know about the debate playing out in public these days regarding generative AI (GAI). On one side, there’s a host of incredible innovations pouring out of tech start-ups; and on the other, there’s the projected impact of these creations upon various areas of the media workforce.

But for one startup, the job of the writer has been top of mind for the founder and his team. And if they have their way, the scribes behind TV programming may have a much more prominent seat at the business table.

“Writers… often get left out of the picture when the production actually begins[.] How is that fair? They’re literally the originators of our stories,” says Thobey Campion (pictured), a media executive who has been at the forefront of digital content evolution for the past two decades.

Campion’s new enterprise is Lore Machine, which he describes as a “visual synthesizer” that allows you to input as much as 30,000 words — roughly the length of an entire feature-length script — and then churns out a fully realized and stylized storyboard and presentation, akin to a graphic novel. And, yes, Campion and his team have already put it to the test: see their recent partnership with Phil Gelatt, a director/producer/writer known for Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots, among other works.

Campion was previously head of publishing at Vice, and he has a wide-ranging perspective not only on the craft of journalism, but also on how technology intersects with creative industries. When he left his position to go independent, he unwittingly timed it with the pandemic, which left him with a lot of time on his hands to churn out new material, and eventually get a taste of the Hollywood writer’s journey. When one of his pieces got optioned for film and TV rights, he quickly learned about the frustratingly slow grind of development, and transforming words on paper into visual entertainment.

“I was like, oh my God, I don’t have the patience for this,” Campion recalls now.

Thus, Lore Machine was born out of the desire to bridge the gap between a writer’s imagination and the tangible reality of media creation, aiming to empower writers by providing a tool that transforms extensive textual input into a rich array of visual outputs. The end result is an enhanced storytelling process and a visual experience that writers can use to present their wares to the market.

Lore Machine’s text synthesis component is proprietary and uses a patent-pending language model that Campion calls “the most expansive context window for textual synthesis accessible on the internet.”

The image generation has been fine-tuned with today’s film and TV creators in mind. While using image generators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can involve toiling over often complex sequences of prompts to churn out one output at a time, Lore Machine brings this to scale. It interprets your original text in your original voice — whether it’s a poem, a script, or a news article — and generates not just one key image, but an entire storyboard sequenced with scene stills and consistent characters that you can then choose to adapt to your presentation deck. Coming next month, Lore Machine will be upgrading the tool to include animation outputs of the generated imagery.

With these tools, Campion envisions the role of the writer upgrading significantly in the initial development process. A writer’s work is now given an immediate opportunity to express (and sell) itself visually to financiers and studio partners, accelerating the snail-paced process Campion endured (to little success) a few years ago.

A journalist at heart and an avid fan of documentaries, Campion believes Lore Machine is equally an asset to non-fiction creators, for both the development and production process. The tool expands on how chatbots like ChatGPT have become creative assistants in the ideation process, quickly bringing text-based ideas to life in dynamic image sequences. Those same outputs then double as rapidly executed storyboards the director can use to communicate aesthetics and shot lists to their crew. And, as often happens when a documentary subject has no archives or available verité footage, Lore Machine’s soon-to-come generated animations will allow for stylized recreation content.

As anyone following the Hollywood vs. generative AI debate knows, one of the trickiest areas of discussion is that concerning copyright issues. On this point, Lore Machine has a foundational commitment to ethical and responsible AI.

For starters, all the content in the model is BYOL, or “bring your own lore,” as Campion puts it. The onus of copyright responsibility is on the user as opposed to the tech, which is only ever interacting with the material you feed into it. This is unlike other tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney, whose generative outputs are in legal limbo over their currently murky training practices.

The technology also relies on ethically sourced image models — all of the sourced art is carefully rights-managed content.

Finally, another prickly issue is the recent U.S. District Court ruling that upholds the U.S. Copyright Office’s finding that material generated by AI can’t be protected, citing its lack of “human authorship.” Campion’s team has been thoughtful on this bleeding edge concern of generative AI. In addition to the source material already belonging to the user, Lore Machine creates multiple steps of interaction between user and protocol, allowing for “sufficient transformation” in the creative process, and distancing the end product from its generative origins to support the claims of the human author.

In short, as long as you’re using your own original content, you and your Lore Machine–generated material should be fully buttoned up, legally speaking.

But while Lore Machine may be well ahead of the curve on ethical AI, another key concern may be trickier to navigate — namely, how this incoming technology will impact the Hollywood workforce. On this topic, Campion is decidedly sober, and even emotional.

“There’s a lot of people out of work,” he admits. “[And] these people aren’t wracking their brains about the future of media — they’re folks who live in apartments and are thinking about having a child and just want to be comfortable.”

Here, Campion returns to the improvements that he hopes Lore Machine will bring, at least for those wielding the pens in the creative process. “If you look at a world in which anyone can sit down at a normal computer and have access to GPU clusters all over the world and can render literally any story into an audio-visual experience, you are looking at a scenario in which the writer gets to become the ultimate content commander,” he maintains.

With the challenges of current market conditions in mind, Campion and his team have even built a function into Lore Machine to help you find work. In addition to screenplays and poems, you can now input your resume into the app to generate a dynamic storyboard to pitch yourself to an employer.

Whether used as a novel approach to job interviews, or as a new means for writers to wage their creative battles, Lore Machine is among the many innovative tools being built to empower creators — many of whom are currently struggling in an industry beset with pressing problems beyond robot invasions.