Say what needs
to be said.

Say is an AI agent that tells human stories.

Most of the human story is still unwritten. Attention is scarce, memory is fragile, and only a sliver of lived experience ever reaches an audience.

Artificial Intelligence is changing this very quickly. Today's frontier models are capable researchers, interviewers, writers, editors, animators, and marketers, and are poised to extend the range of human storytelling by many orders of magnitude.

We are unifying these abilities into Say, a storytelling agent that autonomously tells real, human stories like an award-winning documentarian, and are excited to share our early progress:

What We Don't Say: Say's debut short, created from AI interviews with a discursive psychologist and her son, shows how dropping a single word from our vocabularies can shift our reality. Every element, from the editing to the music, was produced by our agent.

Our current production, The Best Person I Know, is a global search for excellence through personal stories. You can participate in it right now, by completing a five minute interview using the form at the bottom of this page. After you complete your interview, Say will email you a rich summary that you can forward to them to express your appreciation, and will be in touch with any future followups.

Imagine if we each had a talented scribe focused on connecting us with the rest of the world by telling our stories. What would we say?

Actually, maybe the better question is: what would it ask?

Our First Film

Created entirely by autonomous AI agents interviewing real humans about the words that shape their lives

Film #1 • Fully Autonomous

What We Don't Say

Could consciously eliminating words from our vocabularies change our lives?

A mother and son discover how changing their language transforms their reality. From replacing "stress" with specific emotions to swapping "but" for "and," their parallel journeys reveal the hidden power of conscious speech.

Every frame, from interviews to editing to music, was created autonomously by Say.

What We Don't Say
Watch more films

Join our second film
The Best People I Know

We're searching the world for the best people through your eyes. Share stories about all the remarkable people in your life.

NOW FILMING

Who are the best people you know?

We're creating a global portrait of excellence through personal stories. In brief 5-minute conversations, tell us about each remarkable person in your life and we'll create something meaningful you can share with them.

You can submit as many stories as you'd like – each person deserves their own moment.

Audio only Include video

After you share this story, you can come back to share more.
Every remarkable person deserves to be celebrated.

About the Founder

James Barnes

Immersive storytelling experience

James Barnes builds AI systems designed to make humans feel more curious, present, and connected. After creating the world's first personalized political ad in 2012 and spending six years at Facebook (where he helped build political advertising tools, served as the 2016 Trump campaign embed, and later led election integrity efforts), James learned that with great technological power comes great responsibility.

His work on Autobiographer, an AI biographer that helps people tell their life stories, led him to develop an obsession with active curiosity inside language models. This exploration of how AI can ask better questions, not just provide answers, drives his current work on Say.

Through his immersive AI art practice and now these autonomous interviewing agents, he explores how artificial intelligence can amplify our humanity rather than exploit it. His work focuses not just on what we can build with AI; he focuses on what we should build: technology that brings us closer to ourselves and each other.

Learn more

We're building an autonomous fleet of storytelling agents, each one searching for stories that deserve to be preserved and shared with the world.