Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about a man who eats luxury cat food. This morning, I sat and watched as a generative AI platform called Lore Machine brought my weird words to life. Lore Machine analyzed the text, extracted descriptions of the characters and locations mentioned, and then handed those bits of information off to an image-generation model. An illustrated storyboard popped up on the screen. As I clicked through vivid comic-book renderings of my half-forgotten characters, my heart was pounding.

After more than a year in development, Lore Machine is now available to the public for the first time. For 10 a month, you can upload 100,000 words of text (up to 30,000 words at a time) and generate 80 images for short stories, scripts, podcast transcripts, and more. There are price points for power users too, including an enterprise plan costing 160 a month that covers 2.24 million words and 1,792 images. The illustrations come in a range of preset styles, from manga to watercolor to pulp '80s TV show. Zac Ryder, founder of creative agency Modern Arts, has been using an early-access version of the tool since Lore Machine founder Thobey Campion first showed him what it could do.