Short version: everything here was generated with AI tools, under my creative direction. Here's the long version.
I've been chasing new ways to tell stories my whole career. Alternate reality games that spilled a TV show out into the real world. Online story worlds that ran alongside a series. Narrative design for games, and an interactive campaign that pulled in more than nine million people.
So when the new AI platforms showed up, I did what I always do. I started experimenting. Orbital Ranch Studios is what came out of it: books, scripts, games, albums, audiobooks and websites, all made in a scribbler's room of one, with AI as the cyber elephant in the room.
Everything on this site was generated with AI tools, under my creative direction. I'd rather say that up front than have anybody find it in the fine print.
That includes the 400-plus posts in my Scribbler's Toolbox, the courses and the reference library. AI helped write those too, and every page there says so at the bottom.
| Tool | What it does here |
|---|---|
| Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini | Drafting, revision, art and code, depending on the job |
| Perplexity | Research |
| Runway, ChatGPT | The trailers and film clips |
| Suno | All of the music: the concept albums and scores. Claude and ChatGPT helped with the lyrics, drawn from the stories |
| ElevenLabs | The digital narration on the audiobooks |
The tools change fast, so this list will too. Some projects used a few of them, some used all of them.
The stories, the worlds and the people in them, built from my un-produced material: pitches, pilots and development notes. Every creative call: what the story is, who lives, what gets cut, which jokes stay, what sounds like me. And the notes, draft after draft.
The craft comes from thirty years of tools I've shared on my blog, scribblejerk.com, and collected here in my Scribbler's Toolbox. Claude and I turned them into skills the tools run on every draft, and we built a voice guide from my unsold screenplays and pitches so the pages sound like me. The Screenplays page walks through one of these projects start to finish.
The Writers Guild of America says AI isn't a writer, and AI can't take a writing credit. The credit stays with the person who brought the story and made the calls. That's why my scripts say “written by Jesse Alexander.” I follow the same rule on the books, and every project page says how it was made.
When I started, I used AI as a bounded helper: diagnostics, stress tests, consistency checks. I wrote that down in my Statement of Practice and my AI Manifesto. Both are still up on the home page, with a note on where I've landed since.
My curiosity took me further than those rules. The ones about curiosity and protecting your voice still hold. So does the last one: joy is the only metric that matters.
Every one of my published novels ends with an About the Author page. I'm working on a new version that says plainly how the books get made. Here's the draft:
Jesse Alexander