Infinite Tales

Making sentiment sustainable with AI and cute little characters

I really enjoy doodling and making pretty pictures. My brother really enjoys sustainable packaging design. I think mine is more fun. But we decided to bring our weird enjoyments together and create some greetings cards.

We were playing with the insight that people always have that twinge of guilt when they throw out a card, especially when it’s sentimental for their kids. Birthday cards from Grandma & Grandpa either end up in a box or in the trash. We wanted to create a way for that sentiment to stick around longer, to make a reason for kids to pull out that card from Grandma & Grandpa, to appeal to their attention span and bring some longevity to these otherwise fleeting messages.

What if they could somehow have an ongoing purpose, a mechanic that could keep them fresh and interesting? We thought it would be magical, if every time you opened the card it was somehow different. And so the idea of Infinite Tales was conceived.

Infinite Tales is simply a website which every time you reload it, tells a different story about the characters on the front of the card. You scan a QR code inside the cover of the card, and the story is delivered on your phone.

We set a few restraints and parameters and used some detailed ChatGPT prompts to create a unique story every time anyone scans the code. The characters become beloved and familiar, but no two stories are ever the same.

It then becomes easy to build out this universe with different characters on different cards, and the kids can collect them like storybooks, except the stories never get old.

It’s a fun experiment, and you can feel ChatGPT when you read the stories, they are by no means narrative masterpieces. But the sentiment is solid it’s fun to play around. We also used MidJourney to generate all the imagery, and I used ChatGPT to help write some of the code to access it’s own API which was a wild experience.

You can check out the prototype stories here, here, and here.