Hi Paul,

I’ve been creating a lot with AI recently, mainly for friends and family or just to amuse myself.

I also made some things for Suno, the AI music company and for hackathons.

Here are some of the things I’ve made. You can find my pre-AI projects at the bottom of the page.

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention and motivation. Looking back at this I think the through line is taking control of life online (which is just life nowadays). Or perhaps just living on your own terms.

The CULTURE, long united, must divide, long divided, must unite

Blocket

I actually love the medium of advertising.

The imagery and copywriting.

Condensing a complex idea into it's purest form.

So I made a social ad blocker.

It swaps ads for things your friends and family made. People can upload photos, drawings or AI-made ads, which then appear around the web for their friends.

I like the thought of seeing an advert for a friends games night this Friday, a new dog announcement, or something silly in the middle of a news website or Twitter.

A blank blue billboard under a London railway bridge with THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING painted across it

Replace annoying ads with your friends: a news site showing games night at matts 19:30 wed and james birthday! where the ads were

Before and after: the same news page with car, shoe and bank ads, then with friends' posts in their place: a new jacket, hi from london, games night at matts 19:30 wed

Ads Value

I was watching YouTube with my nephew when an advert for a toy came on.

The instant it finished he wanted one.

My brother asked, “Why can’t we make ads for broccoli like that?”

So I made a Chrome extension that replaces YouTube ads with videos I made for myself.

They encourage me to go to bed earlier, stop doomscrolling and eat broccoli.

You Snooze You Lose

Why do I wake up to an industrial siren?

I made an alarm clock app that wakes me up with voice notes from friends and family.

They often start sweetly and get progressively angrier when you press snooze.

We can send each other music. Also it costs money to snooze.

Shush!

Mute annoying people IRL

Shush is an iPhone app that selectively mutes annoying people.

It uses AI to recognise people's voices and plays music or relaxing sounds over them in your AirPods.

A woman in AirPods shushing while four people talk at her; two of them have their volume muted, two are turned up

Unison

This is something I’d wanted to build for years but couldn’t get working.

Then I found an open-source project by Freeman Jiang that solved the main problem, so I tried again.

Unison splits a song into different parts. Everyone in a room scans a QR code, and each phone plays a different part through its speaker.

With the right song, it sounds like a little band.

To hear the whole thing, you have to be together.

Skip

A podcast player that automatically skips the ads.

Because life’s too short to listen to podcasters shilling mattresses

Blackmail

An app I made to force myself to use my phone less. I took some embarrassing photos of myself and gave the app permission to blackmail me into putting my phone down.

Rory Sutherland called it genius. The App Store reviewers’ verdict was “rejected”.

No one is bored, everything is boring. Freedom from your phone. The oldest motivational strategy: SHAME. Because you don't need motivation, you need consequences.

I want to focus for 5 minutes, with a big red Start button

Manifesto: No one is bored, everything is boring. Freedom from your phone

Manifesto: look at this pigeon, addicted to his little reward. What an idiot

Manifesto: how did this happen? B.F. Skinner experimenting on pigeons in his lab

Onboarding: Yeah yeah yeah, you’ll start tomorrow. Your life slips away one swipe at a time

Onboarding: locking your photo in the vault

NES Hotline

I remember calling the Nintendo hotline when I got stuck in Zelda. I recreated that feeling as an iOS game. It’s 1990, you work on the Nintendo help line, and kids phone you because they’re stuck in their favourite games. You have to talk them through it.

A caller playing Super Mario Bros. on the TV while you talk them through it

Incoming call: a Nintendo that won’t play the game

Blow into the mic to clear the dust off the cartridge

The Legend of Zelda: a kid with no sword

Punch-Out!! on the TV, Glass Joe in the counselor notes

World Fighting League

A Pokémon-style game for me and my friends. Take a photo of any object and turn it into a fighter with random stats, then battle in a WhatsApp group. My toothbrush versus Al’s spider versus Sophie’s hairbrush. We crown a weekly champion.

I want to add commentary, news reports, podcasts and AI-generated blogs that discuss the fighters’ lore in absurd detail.

Language learning is my hobby. I lived in China for half my adult life, which gave me a strong reason to learn Chinese. Since leaving, I’ve had to manufacture that need.

A few language experiments

An app blocker that forces me to win an argument in Chinese before I can open distracting apps.

A keyboard that makes me type in Chinese to reply in English. An app that clones my voice so I can practise shadowing myself. And a memory-palace experiment that overlays 3D objects and imagery on Apple Maps.

Your fav apps are locked until you win an argument with an angry AI: a man shouts at a phone that's laughing at him

Memory Palace welcome screen: a flamingo on a bike and a rubber duck reading the paper. “Remember anything by putting it somewhere you know.”

Walk mode at the Louvre: stop 2 of 7, the Arc du Carrousel becomes the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Stop 4 of 7: a golden Zeus the size of a house reads the paper on a garden bench

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

I think about TV news a lot. I love the 1990s news aesthetic: the graphics, the urgency, the suggestion that history is unfolding live. It becomes funny when you apply it to the tiny events in a family’s life.

One problem with social media is that there isn’t enough content from people you know, so you end up watching strangers. Soon that may turn into personalised AI slop with an audience of one. But I think there’s another possibility, and the inspiration comes from TV news.

Twenty-four-hour news had the same problem: there wasn’t enough news to fill the hours. So broadcasters went out and looked for stories.

CULTURE

Long united, must divide,

Long divided, must unite

Me News Network (MENN)

Friends and family send in videos, pictures, texts and voice notes. An AI reporter turns them into a bulletin and gets reactions.

When it works, it’s genuinely funny. A kid scoring a goal at football gets treated as a world-historical event—which, to a small group of people, it is. I think it’s a glimpse of a personalised, sensational, but not exploitative social-media future.

Wildlife News

My niece is obsessed with local wildlife, so I made her a daily news show. It gathers wildlife data, collects bird calls and produces a very serious two-minute report on what’s happening outside.

Diffusion hasn’t really happened yet. I keep thinking about positive uses for AI, beyond making more content. Here are two experiments.

Spotting brick kilns from space

I was haunted by what I read about forced labour in South Asian brick kilns. Volunteers have spent years searching satellite photographs for the telltale shapes of kilns. Those locations can help NGOs decide where to investigate.

I tried automating the first pass with vision models. I’m cleaning it up to share with a charity. Similar tools could help find illegal logging, polluted rivers and all sorts of other problems. The underlying technology is becoming cheap and widely accessible.

Workers at a brick field in Bangladesh carry baskets of wet clay on their heads to a mixing trough, with the kiln chimney behind them

Oval brick kiln among fields in Uttar Pradesh

Brick kiln beside dense green fields in Bangladesh

Brick kiln with rows of drying bricks in Gujarat

Seeing yourself succeed

I used to be a teacher. It was painful to see children who were socially excluded and not know how best to help. Some struggle with joining a game or starting a conversation.

Video modelling teaches behaviours by showing someone successfully doing them. There’s research suggesting that watching a video of yourself performing a target behaviour can help some children develop social and communication skills.

Generative video could make those examples easier to tailor to a particular child and situation. I’m trying to set up a study to test whether that actually works. It feels like a natural fit for the technology, but it needs proper evidence.

A boy with a backpack stands by a tree at the edge of a school playground, watching a group of children play football.

The same boy sits at a desk watching a tablet video of a child being welcomed into a playground game, while two researchers observe.

Back in the playground, the boy joins the football game and the other children welcome him in.

A psychologist at a laptop edits a playground video scenario, choosing the child, setting and activity from simple panels.

I’ve always liked experiments that turn an idea into something people can actually use.

Training Data

A WarioWare-style game I made for @levelsio’s game-building competition. It came second out of more than 1,500 entries. It’s really fun.

Find this: a T-bone steak above Joe Rogan’s head and an alien monk pointing. Pull that 🥩 up!

The Tinder round: Max, 28, photographer, an angry bearded man coding next to a pizza, with swipe left and right buttons

Before AI

	SunoVarious projects for Suno exploring AI music
	Bufferi.ng (acquired)Fake a bad connection on Zoom
	TwikTwokTwitter + TikTok = TwikTwok
	FuckOff.ytTell YouTube ads to Fuck Off
	P-BlockProduct Hunt Silver Kitty winner
🏠	SwipeMove.homesTinder for real estate
🤖

🌳 MpTree — This Song Plants Trees

A few years ago I uploaded a spoken-word track about tree planting to Spotify. The idea was that the money it generated in royalties would go to planting trees. People could add it to playlists to offset their listening.

4.2 million streams later, it’s been featured in media all over the world and has a dedicated pool of listeners.

42,000trees planted

4.2M+streams

6languages

Planted in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Haiti

mptr.ee Listen on Spotify

Bufferi.ng — Fake a bad connection on Zoom

“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary.” David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs (1961–2020)

Bufferi.ng helps you fake a bad connection on Zoom.

Suffering from Zoom fatigue?
Sick of meetings, get togethers and conferences?
Boss asked a difficult question on video chat?

Bufferi.ng gives you a simple way to stutter your webcam and distort the sound.

P.s it works on MS teams, Skype and anything else that uses your computer’s webcam.

The passive aggressive fightback starts here.

Featured in The Sun, Daily Mail, Hypebeast, El País, Les Echos and T3

See it on Product Hunt