What my niece is making now.

I visited my niece last weekend.

She’s seven now. The kid I made the bedtime story for last year, the one I started this whole newsletter about. She still has the book I made her. It’s slightly more worn than it was. Marshmallow the whale, her stuffed animal, sleeps next to it.

She had something for me when I arrived.

She walked over to her little wooden desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a four-page booklet she’d made herself. Stapled along the left edge. Front cover in red crayon: FOR TAPAN. (Her mom had helped her spell my name.)

She handed it to me.

It was a four-page story about Marshmallow the whale going to space. Each page was a crayon drawing on one side and a line or two of her own handwriting on the other side. The whale travels to the moon. The whale meets the moon’s whales (apparently the moon has whales). The whale gets scared but is brave. The whale comes home. The end.

The handwriting was uneven, the spelling was almost entirely wrong, the drawings were a seven-year-old’s drawings — Marshmallow had eight fins and a hat for some reason, the moon’s whales had triangle eyes, the rocket ship was actually a banana. It was the best thing I’ve held in my hands in months.

She said: I made you one because you make me ones.

I want to sit with that sentence for a minute.

This is what I think we are not talking about enough in our small corner of AI. The bedtime story I made her last year was made with AI. It took eleven minutes. It made her cry in a good way. It changed how she thought of herself a little bit — she was a person stories could be about. She kept it. She read it three times in a row.

A year later, she wrote me a story back.

She didn’t use AI. She didn’t need to. She’s seven. She used crayons and her own brain and the time her mom set aside on a rainy Saturday afternoon. The story she gave me has nothing to do with the technology I’m always writing about here. It has everything to do with the gift I gave her, because the gift gave her permission to give one back.

This is the part of the story almost nobody is writing.

When you make something for someone with AI, the thing you’re really making is permission. You’re saying I noticed you. I spent time thinking about you. I made something that didn’t exist before today, because you exist. That’s a gift. The AI is the tool. The gift is the noticing.

And the noticing, it turns out, is contagious.

My niece, who got noticed in book form last year, now makes books for people. Not because anyone taught her to. Not because she’s special. Because once you’ve been given a story about yourself, written by someone who paid attention to who you are, you start to understand that this is a thing people do for each other. And then you start doing it back.

This is what I think the people inside the loud AI conversation keep missing. They’re measuring what the technology can do. They should also be measuring what the technology, used well, sets off.

A bedtime story made in eleven minutes with AI started a chain of small creative acts that includes, fourteen months later, a seven-year-old making a four-page book about a whale who goes to space. None of that shows up in any product metric. All of it is the actual point.

I drove home with the book in the passenger seat. It’s now in the top drawer of my desk, next to the only other things I keep there — a few letters from my grandfather, my old wedding ring, a pebble from a beach I went to once with someone I loved. The drawer for things I would grab in a fire.

That’s the second one. After the drawing on the fridge.

I’m really glad you’re here.

— Tapan

PS — If you’ve made something for someone with AI and they’ve made something back for you in their own way — write me. The chain is the actual newsletter.