Inside an AI Story Lab: Crafting Voice and Vision in an AI Era

I’m almost halfway through teaching a month-long course on AI and creativity—and the pace is relentless. The syllabus was signed off months ago, but I rewrite my slides every week. New features drop overnight. New tools emerge. The race is tighter than ever. What was experimental yesterday becomes standard today. Teaching this means staying in motion.

I’m teaching at SUPSI, a leading Swiss university, but it’s online and the class is deliberately small—just eight professionals—which makes it a tight, responsive environment. They came in with strong story ideas: a fertility journey, a dinosaur-hunting story, a film revisited after decades, forests that speak, a fiction script in the works. Multiple mediums, different stages. Each one is now a live project, evolving fast.

This week they pitched their stories, refined custom GPTs, trained image models, generated early shot lists. We didn’t wait for polished scripts. Tools like Midjourney and Flora let you prototype storyworlds immediately. Visuals feed back into the writing. Midjourney king Rory Flynn’s mantra—fail quicker—landed hard.

We talked about world-building as a practice of coherence—where everything feels like it belongs to the same universe. Tone, texture, pacing, color, form. It must serve the message. Every choice is considered. It’s about building an environment that breathes with consistency and gives the story its atmosphere. When done well, it moves under the surface and carries emotional weight without explanation. And VOICE. Every class is a chance to empower individuals to share their story, how they see the world.

It’s about mindset. Tools change fast. Your approach needs to stay open and agile so you can move efficiently, tell your stories, and express your voice with clarity and speed.

We explored creative workflows—how to work under pressure and still make something that holds. The students are getting how to use these tools not just to generate content, but to shape vision and refine intuition.

Back from AI Week Milan, I brought fresh energy into class. 16,000 people a day, 400 speakers—intense. Most of the spotlight was on enterprise and automation, but there was electricity in the creative corners. I finally met Rory, saw Davide Bianca of Grail speak, and connected with Katya Vettorello—whose attention to visual precision is next level. Her work on LinkedIn continues to show just how alive that platform is for serious creative dialogue in AI. At the end of the day, these moments of personal exchange were the BEST.

Also tracking the Burano AI Film Festival. Sharp curation, strong community. The ecosystem around AI x cinema is getting real—fast.

Spaces like AI Week and this class are about transferring knowledge, yes. But mostly…in my small way, teaching allows me to create the space for creatives to play in a live lab, a space to test, rethink, build, and keep pace with an ecosystem that doesn’t slow down. We’re learning tools while we are building stories and worlds that reflect how we create now.

Will be sharing more from the class soon. Write me if you’re curious about something in particular…

Bon voyage!

Elettra