i am joining openai

after a year of making videos on the internet

for the last year, i have been making videos on the internet.

full-time content creator.

it still feels surreal to think about.

the year was filled with both existential reckoning and wonderful, endless inspiration.

hello from the studio!

a year ago, i still wasn’t sure i’d have the courage to try and become a creator.

it was the final stretch of college, and i had spent the last couple of years picking up the camera and putting it down again.

i've always wanted to make videos, but i was afraid of being judged. i was afraid of not being good at it. and whenever those fears weren’t enough, i could always tell myself i didn’t have time.

dear creator:

that was, until 2025, when the little itch came back once again.

after spending some time making films for hackathons and feeling too old to worry about being judged by stanford freshmen, i realized it was time to really do the thing.

and i had a vision, too, that combined my favorite aesthetics. for examples, i loved the coziness of ghibli films, and the punk of cyberpunk. could i create the world i dreamed about in video?

so, the journey began.

i filmed from my dorm room, first about the things i loved, and eventually about making things with technology. the topics branched out into design, commentary, software, and electronics.

for the first few months, my anonymous account remained a passion project only close friends saw.

then, on the eleventh video, a lot of people suddenly started watching (perhaps you)

it all felt magical.

for much of my life, while engineering felt sensible, dependable, i loved art without needing it to be productive, or sensible.

still, i would push art into the margins of whatever ‘time was left’.

videos became my art.

and this time, for the first time, the artistic path felt like the one i should see through.

the essential feature of adventure is that it is a going forward into unknown territory. - agnes martin

i gave myself one year to go fully independent, leaving behind the traditional engineering path to write, film, edit, light a room, build electronics, explain complicated ideas, and make something from nothing, usually alone.

naturally, i documented the one-year experiment as it happened: leaving my job, negotiating the division of the influencer and the artist in me, and trying to preserve boundless wonder as computers became very good at creative things.

there was so much i loved about being a creator.

a few things not so much.

and there were many things i wanted to do something about. a small initial list:

1. slop sucks.

2. artists, creators, and storytellers must be a greater part of shaping technology and the future.

3. people, broadly—us all—we need to be included in that conversation.

4. there are better stories to tell about the future, better possibilities to imagine

i’m joining openai because i want to shape the future.

i understand judgement will follow from my decision.

if you follow my work already, you are probably someone who cares very deeply about making things too. you might be wary of ai. you may distrust the organizations that build it, and fairly so. you may feel uncomfortable that a machine would replicate the love you put into your craft.

i have felt all of those things.

although, i have negotiated an opinion i think is more nuanced yet held by many creatives I know.

when i was at stanford, i lived in one of the smaller dorms on campus.

it didn’t really leave much room left, after a bed and a desk.

a more forgiving picture of my room, which i had specifically remembered decorating for this picture.

i wanted to make beautiful videos, and to do so, i needed a beautiful room.

so i bought fairy lights and eventually, whatever else i could—and used generative fill to invent the rest i wished existed. an early exploration:

when you are writing, filming, lighting, editing, compositing, and producing everything by yourself, there becomes a point where the distance between what you can imagine and what you can physically finish becomes enormous.

ai made that distance much smaller.

looking back now at those early videos, with the make-shift set and generative fill, i feel enormously proud.

sure, they look scrappy and ill-timed to my better-trained eye.

but they feel like living memories of a moment where i loved an idea enough to remember it in a piece of art.

i wasn’t happy because a machine made them. i was happy because i made them.

susan kare was particularly editorial about pixels; her work infused emotion into the earliest, most constrained machines.

the spark had survived the journey into the world.

that has been my experience with ai more broadly.

it has helped me learn things i did not know how to start learning.

it has helped me create the systems that made more room for the craft.

it has helped me become more than i knew how to be.

that does not mean i like everything ai is used for. i dislike slop, for one, and i believe it takes away from the greater vision that ai is fundamentally about amplification, not replacement.

‘ai’ has become an too-small blanket for an great number of things. i find some uses wonderful and others bleak.

that is also why i want to go inside; to understand and shape the innovation from within, far closer than creating as a storyteller on the outside.

for the past year, i have been learning what technology can offer an artist.

now, i want to see what i might offer in return.

i want to bring your voice into this room. what could it feel like to be excited by ai, suspicious of it, frightened by it, embracing it openly, rejecting it altogether, using it in secret?

from one of my favorite op-eds, sketched out.

i do not want to convince you that ai is good.

i am much more interested in asking why you think it is bad.

what happened?

what did technology fail to understand about you?

what did we fail to understand when building it?

what would we have to change for it to feel useful, respectful, joyful, or even simply worth your time?

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feel free to reach me here, on twitter, or on instagram! (@covacut)

i’ll keep making my own independent content, alongside official projects i’m excited to share with you once they’re up!

dorm-room tinkering!

got friends tapped into hardware.

many coasts were explored

made friends in cool places (like open sauce!)

took over an old office space! being a creator is lonely; i learned to invite people in.

a new chapter that still feels familiar ~