Come Into the Scary Cabin...(where AIs will help you tell stories)

I'm really excited by this new idea, developed by Mashup Machine, a company led by my old friend, best man, and Academy Award Winner Ben Cole.Basically, Mashup Machine is collaborative storytelling, mixed with real time animation, supplemented by machine learning that mines the space of possible stories, and automatically suggest ways that stories can progress. It's part automated storyboard, part meme generator, part idea factory, all awesome.Those of you who know me know that I don't believe the AI hype, that I don't think AIs are going to become sentient anytime soon, and that they aren't going to adequately replace people in anything of real complexity. In fact, I think that the real danger of AI is the artificiality of its intelligence, and how that artificiality is becoming too accepted as "smart" socially.However, I think Mashup Machine is different. It's not AIs taking over one of the most human processes: storytelling. Instead, it's AI shaped by crowds of real people, helping huge numbers of people to interactively come up with interesting new ideas. It's a whole new kind of human/computational creativity.If you are as turned on by this as I am, sign up for the closed beta of Scary Cabin!