This summer has been one of my most productive yet — thanks in part to a new helper in my process: GPT.
I know a lot of creative people and working artists instinctively recoil from AI tools. I understand that. For me, GPT is less of a push-button creative machine and more of an office assistant: a sounding board, research partner, and stat cruncher who never gets tired of answering questions, is never grumpy, and never reheats leftover fish in the office microwave.
Making Sense of the Numbers
After I launch a new video, I used to spend hours lost in YouTube analytics. There are pages of charts and layers upon layers of data, and I’ll admit it — I’m not a “math guy.” I’d stare at spreadsheets with no clue what I was looking at nor how to interpret it.
Now I just grab a screenshot of the relevant chart, drop it into GPT, and within a minute I get a plain-English analysis. It explains trends, shows me how YouTube is pushing (or not pushing) a video, and even teases out subtle insights like the difference between suggested views and browse views. Then it offers a plan of action – try a different thumbnail, change the title, add it to a playlist, post an excerpt as a short, etc. That has been enormously helpful.
Where It Helps (and Where It Doesn’t)
GPT is not my scriptwriter. It doesn’t understand my sense of humor, my storytelling rhythms, or the subtleties of appealing to the 3–6 year old audience I’ve performed for thousands of times over the last couple decades.
But it is great for structured help:
- Suggesting quick lists of obstacles or scene ideas (even if most are bad — sometimes it helps to hear what you don’t want).
- Breaking down a finished script into production steps and schedules (super tedious work).
- Creating mockups of thumbnails before I commit (enormous time saver).
- Optimizing titles, descriptions, and metadata for YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (another tedious job).
All of this saves me hours and makes sure everything is up to all the different standards without affecting the actual storytelling.
A Creepy Reminder
There have been eerie moments, too. Every once in a while, it makes weird mistakes. It “hallucinates” bizarre answers. That’s a good reminder that it’s not infallible. Once, GPT offered to condense my values into a “creative manifesto” in my own voice. What it wrote landed squarely in the uncanny valley — close enough to feel familiar, but robotic enough to feel unsettling.
And while it did reflect my principles, the irony of letting AI write a manifesto (imitating my voice) about the importance of preserving imperfect humanity in my work was head-spinning-ly ironic. Like… what are you doing, man?! I kept the document not as a blueprint, but as a reminder that I have to run the show. I have to be responsible for this. Don’t get weird, man.
Why I’m Sharing This
So why share all this? Because I want parents and teachers to understand that GPT helps me organize, polish, and save time, but the heart of Mister Kipley — the songs, the stories, the silly ideas kids love — that all still comes from me. It’s all reflections of my family, the kids at my shows, stories I remember from my own (ancient) childhood, my struggles and fears and joys along the way… it’s all coming from my life experience, not a giant database that imitates human language.
I want my work to always be rooted in humanity, and while I use computers through my production process, I try to keep it all as human as possible. I write the stories and the songs, I play many of the instruments in the recordings, it’s my daughter and I singing and doing the voices of all the characters – we try to keep it as “real” as possible while delivering a high-quality product on the inhuman schedule that youtube demands. YouTube is hungry, you gotta feed the beast.
The technology may be new, but the essence of my work is as ancient as sitting around the campfire telling stories. That’s the point of all this.