Why I Created Dead Air

The cursor was blinking. My home studio was quiet. I was drafting a monthly blog post for Mutable Fire — my astrology-themed publication I write under the pseudonym of Daljeet Peterson, a spiritual name I’ve used since 2020 for work aligned with my wider spiritual practice.

This time, curiosity got the better of me. I wondered: could ChatGPT write this as well as I can… maybe even better?

So I opened ChatGPT 3.5 (which was the current model at the time). The text box prompted: “Ask anything.”

The synthetic voice was waiting for me to speak first.

“Alright,” I said, half to myself, half to the machine. “Let’s see what you can really do.” I typed: “Write me a short blog post on the current astrological weather.”

What came back was confident, cleanly written… and completely wrong. Not just a little off — the kind of wrong that made me wonder if the machine and me were even looking at the same sky. Full blown hallucination.

That should have been the end of it. But something about the way it almost worked made me lean in instead of logging out. I corrected the errors, fed back my interpretations of the sky, and watched it return something surprisingly usable.

This experiment as Daljeet was my first foray into human–AI collaboration. And now, Dead Air is the next evolution — a bigger, riskier, and more public one.

The Silence After the Noise

I’d been hearing about AI for a while — the hype, the fear, the hot takes multiplying like rabbits in a Reddit thread. But until that moment writing as Daljeet, it had been mostly background noise.

In 2023, that noise was easy to ignore. I was deep in my best professional year to date, juggling multiple TV shows, clocking long hours in the edit bay. Whatever “revolution” was coming could wait until I had the time to check it out.

Then 2024 hit. The work stopped. Completely. In my thirty years of making a living in media and entertainment, I’d never seen a year like it. The conversations in my corner of the industry had shifted: successful series being shelved, productions going dark, and there was an unspoken but growing anxiety about what generative AI might mean for professionals like me.

The public discourse was a veritable hall of mirrors. On one side, you had techno-doomers warning of creative extinction; on the other, trans-human optimists promising a golden age. Both felt way too certain, and way too loud. I needed to check it out for myself.

So I started experimenting. First with ChatGPT 3.5, then with image models like Stable Diffusion, music models like Suno, and a few other tools. The early results were clumsy, sometimes laughable — but there was something there. Not just as a novelty, but an emerging set of tools I could actually see myself working with. Tools that, in the right hands, might bypass the gatekeepers entirely.

That’s when I decided: I wasn’t going to wait for the industry to tell me how this was going to go. I was going to run my own experiment, in public. Dead Air is becoming that experiment.

Test Signals

Dead Air is conceived as a creativity lab where human ingenuity and machine intelligence meet to make stories, write essays, and run media experiments — with the process made visible as part of the work.

That means you’ll see the seams. You’ll see the moments when I steer the machine, when it surprises me, when it misses the point, and when it nails something I couldn’t have written or created alone.

This is not an AI fan club. It’s not an anti-AI manifesto. It’s not a tech blog or a productivity hack feed. I’m not here to report the latest model release or debate AI ethics like it’s an abstract thought experiment.

[Process interjection]:

Notice the literary tic here. LLM's like ChatGPT just love to tell you what things are not. They programmatically default to structuring sentences that follow a “not X, but Y” logic. It’s called antithesis in classic rhetoric. You're probably seeing it everywhere these days.

Sure, it's effective communication, but when overused it’s annoying— the indelible fingerprint of predictable AI output. As a human, I'm more inclined to lead with what a thing “is” rather than what it “is not.”

So...

Dead Air is about using the tools in real time, as a working creative, and showing you what happens. It’s about the collision between decades of analog experience and a new kind of digital collaborator.

The experiment is open-ended. The methods will change. The tone will shift from personal to analytical and back again. And somewhere in the middle of that oscillation, something interesting just might happen.

Why Do This in Public?

Because the only way I know