We are standing on a precipice. That was the word I used in early 2024, and it has only become more accurate since. The creative industries are experiencing a technological shift comparable to the arrival of sound in cinema, colour in television, Photoshop and Avid for editing, or streaming in distribution. Generative AI, and AI in general, is not merely a new tool in the filmmaker’s kit. It is a force that I increasingly believe will reshape which stories get told, how they are told, who tells them, and who participates in the telling.

If you’ve read my musings here or on other platforms, you know that I have spent the better part of two decades working at the intersection of storytelling and technology. From an iEmmy-nominated cross-media language learning show for children (way way back in the days), to documentary series about climate psychology, to corporate storytelling campaigns and virtual museums, to mentoring documentary filmmakers across Europe through Documentary Campus and Creative Europe – the thread that I find runs through all of it is a deep conviction I’ve always had that stories become more powerful when they live across platforms and invite their audiences in.

Transmedia storytelling emerged in the early 2000s as a groundbreaking approach to narrative. The promise was immense: story worlds that spanned film, television, web, games, and physical spaces, with audiences as active participants rather than passive consumers. But, as is often the case, that promise was diluted. The term quickly got co-opted by marketing departments. The methodology got reduced to “put your trailer on social media.” The deeper structural thinking, about how narratives function differently on different platforms, about how audiences can genuinely co-create meaning, was largely set aside by an industry that found it too complex and too expensive. Why bother?

AI changes that equation. Not because it makes producing transmedia cheap (though it does reduce certain costs), but because it can address the core structural challenges that once held transmedia back: maintaining narrative coherence across platforms, personalising story experiences for different audience segments, scaling content creation without losing creative vision, and most crucially enabling the kind of genuine audience participation that transmedia always promised but rarely delivered (except for a few truly glorious projects).

This series (of which this is the introduction) is my attempt to lay out a framework for how creative professionals can think about AI in this context. For me it’s not (merely) a production shortcut. It shouldn’t and mustn’t be a replacement for human creativity. I feel we should view AI as an architectural component of multiplatform stories. It can be a structural element that, when designed thoughtfully, can finally deliver on the promise that got many of us into transmedia storytelling in the first place. (shoutout to everyone at Storyworld 2011 in San Fransisco :D)

A word of caution: I am doing my best to not get carried away, but stay full aware about the risks. I have written openly about the fact that journalism students in a workshop I ran could not reliably distinguish AI-generated images from authentic ones (and this was over a year ago, when AI was nowhere close to the abilities of today). I am acutely aware that nothing can be taken as factual without verification from trusted sources in this age of synthetic media. My aim is that the ethical dimensions of this technology are not afterthoughts in the framework I’m proposing.

I’ll be releasing eight chapters over the coming days. Whether you read them in sequence or dip into the chapters most relevant to what you’re currently doing, I hope they provide something useful for you. I’m not into hype, nor fearmongering, but I hope we together might arrive at some form of working framework grounded in my three decades of making stories that cross boundaries.