This Substack mainly covers TechXY, and this time the subject only looks like a departure. Since early this year I’ve been building a creative audio project: Only Human: BOUND.
It’s a psychological science-fiction serial set in the Only Human universe, following a political prisoner subjected to systematic memory erasure by an AI, one interrogation session at a time.
I’ve written and developed BOUND, but fluency with technology is what has enabled me to move fast, build at scale, and know precisely where the machine’s usefulness ends and a human has to take over. I often receive questions about AI, and which tools and models I use. Here’s a look inside.
Human in the Loop
There’s a term for how the best AI systems get built: human-in-the-loop. In its strict sense, it means a person stays inside an automated process, with the oversight, the judgment, and the authority to approve or override what the machine produces.
I run my creative work the same way, with one difference. The human isn’t a checkpoint on the machine’s work. The human is driving. Every output is manually reviewed, edited, and approved. The final pass is, and exclusively remains, Only Human.
That's not a slogan I coined for this post. It's how I've worked the whole time. My fiction is rooted in original, human-authored ideas, backed by three decades of archives that pre-date any of these tools. And because I am experienced working with these systems, I can use them as a precision instrument rather than a crutch: to manage the scale of that archive, restructure long-form work into new formats, run audio audits so I can hear the rhythm of my own prose, and handle the technical plumbing of digital distribution. I bring the substance. The technology amplifies.
The making of BOUND taught me the rest. AI is a force multiplier, no question. But on its own it multiplies toward the predictable, the safe, the average of everything it has already seen.
Humans do the opposite. We're hard to control, sometimes exasperating, and impossible to fully predict, and that isn't a flaw to engineer out. It's the entire source of creativity. We're the source every one of these models is built from, and the one thing it can't generate on its own. We go over the walls the machine stops at. We bypass the firewalls and keep going. That friction, that refusal, is where the work actually comes from.
Knowing the tech is what let me build the scaffolding quickly. It's also what showed me its limits. So I directed the work, then handed the irreplaceable parts to the people who do them best: the voice actors (Scott Fitzgerald, Will Profitt, Rita Sirianni, and David Copper), the band DoDriver, sound and studio (ROC Vox Recording & Production), and the animator (Gutter Rabbit). The multiplier is real. What gets multiplied is human.
And that’s really why I’m sharing this. AI conversations mostly live at two extremes, hype on one side, doom on the other. I want to show a third path, the one I’m proud of: know the tools deeply, build with them and with humans, and keep the human driving.
The multiplier is real. What gets multiplied is human.
This is BOUND.
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