I’m a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind working to get the best AI into the hands of the best creators to tell otherwise impossible stories.
I study how humans and machines create together. My work on AI and creativity has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Time Magazine.
I’m an Associate Industry Member at Mila and a Lab Scientist with the Creative Destruction Lab, supporting science-based startups. I earned my Ph.D. in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, and interned at Google Brain, Apple, and Twitter.
Theatre & Improv #
I’m a Canadian Comedy Award-winning improvisor, actor, director, and producer with Rapid Fire Theatre, Improbotics, and an alumni of Die Nasty.
I created the first AI to perform live improv comedy. I’ve performed non-stop improv for over 50 hours (multiple times), and was invited to perform at the 2012 London Summer Olympics.
Productions: Improvised TED Talks (with Julian Faid) • The Professors & Plays by Bots (with Joe Vanderhelm) • Improbotics & HumanMachine (with Piotr Mirowski)
Writing #
The Danger of Nothing
Examining the Cherry Pick Ratio
The Cherry Pick Ratio
Teaching The Disruption
The Golem: An Ancient AI Myth?
37 Questions for my 37th Birthday❓
The Market for Innovation
Early Adoption of Generative AI in Creative Applications
AI Will Fail. That’s A Good Thing.
Weizenbaum's Warning: The Human Side of Computation
AI and Filmmaking
Planes, Trains and the AI Research Cycle
How does art work?
36 Pieces of Advice (Good or Bad) for my 36th Birthday
What Is Prompting, Really?
How Artists Make Technology Better
Portaging: Combining generative AIs
Dramatron
35 🎙️🔴 Audio Recordings for my 35th Birthday
What is it like to be an AGI?
Research #

2025
Technical Director for “ANCESTRA”, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. Published a Google Keyword blog post, “ANCESTRA”: Behind the scenes of our experimental film and accompanying behind-the-scenes video on the making of. Launched Flow: an AI filmmaking tool built with and for creatives.

2024
Launched Google Veo for video generation + VideoFX consumer tool + led collaboration with professional filmmakers effort (including collaboration on filmmaking with Donald Glover and his creative studio, Gilga). Published on measuring divergent creativity in humans and LLMs and an evaluation of LLMs’ humour alignment with comedians.

2023
Launched Dramatron for professionals co-writing screenplays and scripts with language models (code, paper, patent) and published on cultural general intelligence and communicative capital.

2022
Published a guide to designing and evaluating human-centred interactive machine learning, research in emergent communication in populations and at scale, and BIG-bench for evaluating the capabilities of language models.

2021
Launched StoryCentaur for using large language models as creative writing tools (code, paper), published research on collaborative storytelling with humans and AIs, tele-immersive improvisational performance, generating diverse and realistic laughter for interactive art, and symbolic behaviour in artificial intelligence.

2020
Published research on shaping narrative arcs via information-theory and collaborative dialogue, on imitating interactive intelligence, and on using AI to perform improv in any language.

2019
Published Ph.D. thesis Humour-in-the-loop: Improvised Theatre with Interactive Machine Learning Systems and launched TalkGenerator.com for automatically generating engaging presentation slide decks.

2018
Launched Improbotics, a theatre lab pioneering performance alongside generative AI.

2017

2016
Built and performed with an Artificial Improvisor – a chatbot and projected puppet to perform alongside.




















