This website tells stories only while you read them.
Until you look, a story is alive and dead at once. Open one and it writes itself into being — stop reading, and it was never told.
? What is this?A website that only tells stories while someone is reading.
The story isn't sitting here, waiting. Open one and an AI tells it on the spot — its words, its colours, its whole little world. Stop reading and it's gone, as if it was never told.
It's a joke wearing a lab coat — a thought experiment you can click. The only way a story survives is if you freeze it and pass it on.
Open the page and a brand-new story writes itself, just for you.
Like the story? Freeze it before it forgets it was ever told.
Send it on so someone else can read it too.
Read your story — one gets told the moment you open it.
This app is my answer to the AI hype.
It's a social experiment of mine, meant to test whether AI is really as capable and universal as everyone keeps claiming. The app does two simple things: first it asks the AI to come up with a short, surprising story, then it tells that story in the margins of the web page, and finally it fixes its own mistakes. The AI isn't given any constraints or specific wishes — it's just told: go, create! What comes out of that, you can check for yourself. And here are the conclusions I came to during development — un-am-big-u-ous-ly:
AI is not capable of creativity in any form — it is categorically incapable of creating anything that doesn't already exist and hasn't already been thought up. Look at the existing stories: it's an endless compilation of knowledge and skills people have already acquired.
I developed this app with AI too, by the way. It took a week — a prototype. Then another month and a half went into making something that actually, truly works. And I'm still not entirely sure it does.
Nothing has changed since the invention of the axe. You still have to understand what you want, and you still need the knowledge and skills to find and walk the path to it. And along that path you'll still have to think, make mistakes, and solve new problems. AI can help you enormously with that. But it will not carry you to your destination.
And no generative AI is possible at all until we, as a species, understand what mind and thought actually are — and nobody has figured that out yet, Penrose included. This AI fever will fizzle out into nothing, same as it started, and a new winter will set in. And we'll all still have to go to work )))
Yes, a PHP app can be very fast too, and use all those asynchronicities and threads of yours.
The stories they kept coming back to.
Frozen the moment they were told, then opened again and again.