Parker Howell, Howell XR founder, on AI as 100x creative amplifier and Artful Intelligence — Business of Story podcast

The Creators Who Will Thrive in the Age of AI Are the Ones Who Refuse to Let It Think for Them

Why Artful Intelligence — Not Artificial Intelligence — Is the Competitive Advantage No Algorithm Can Copy

You want AI to accelerate your creative output without losing the one thing your audience actually came for: you.

But right now most creators are stuck choosing between two very different mindsets. Fear artificial intelligence as a force of loss — sameness, replacement, theft.

Or embrace it as Artful Intelligence, a force of creative abundance.

The difference between those two mindsets isn’t talent, budget, or access to better tools. It’s whether you encode your irreplaceable expertise into AI before you hit publish — or let it run without you.

Parker Howell has spent 15 years building that case at the wild intersection of art, technology, and the human experience.

The founder of Howell XR, Parker is a filmmaker, VR game developer, augmented reality builder, fire dancer, competitive jiu-jitsu practitioner, Reiki healer, and hospice volunteer who has never once believed that a single discipline is enough.

That renaissance philosophy — the best ideas live where unrelated fields collide — is exactly what has made him one of the most prolific AI-powered creators working today.

In the last 18 months alone, he has built a full VR game with a two-person team in nine months, won $50,000 in a Meta hackathon in 30 days, built a working AI photo booth in 48 hours for $40, and launched an original card game from concept to print-ready in under 24 hours.

None of it was slop. All of it was Artful Intelligence.

What’s in it for You:

  • Why generic AI produces indistinguishable work — and the one shift that makes yours unmistakable
  • How Parker and his two-person team built Monkey Tower, a full VR game, in nine months using AI-assisted coding — a project that would have required 10 people and two to three years five years ago
  • What vibe coding actually is, why it represents a 100x capability leap beyond AI-assisted coding, and how non-developers can use it to build real software
  • How Language IRL, an augmented reality language learning app, won $50,000 in a one-month Meta hackathon — and what that means for any creator willing to experiment
  • Why encoding your expert essence into AI makes it a scalable, legacy-building amplifier instead of a generator of sameness
  • How to build your own custom tools — a CRM, a soundboard, a chess puzzle engine — in under an hour with conversational AI
  • How Jackie Howell built the entire visual deck for SkateBoss, an original card game, overnight using AI and Canva — and had a playable beta prototype in 24 hours

Watch or listen here:

The Real Threat Isn’t AI. It’s Becoming Indistinguishable.

Parker names the central tension of the AI age with surgical precision: “What you’ve done with the StoryCycle Genie® is what everyone who’s an expert in the world should be doing with AI — how do you take your expert capabilities and put them into a system that is now hundred-x, thousand-x scaled?”

That framing reframes everything. The fear conversation about AI is almost entirely focused on replacement. Parker’s evidence points somewhere else entirely. The creators losing ground aren’t being replaced by AI. They’re being displaced by other humans who figured out how to use AI as an amplifier before they did.

The creators winning? They encoded something AI cannot manufacture on its own: lived experience, cultivated taste, domain-specific judgment, and the creative instincts that come from 15 years of living broadly and connecting things that rarely meet.

Vibe Coding: The 100x Leap Most People Haven’t Made Yet

Parker draws a clear distinction between two phases of AI-assisted development that most people treat as the same thing.

Phase one is AI-assisted coding: you describe what you want, the AI writes the code, you inject it into your project. That approach, he estimates, represented a 20x capability gain. Monkey Tower — his first major AI-assisted project — was built in this phase.

It’s a VR puzzle platformer for Meta Quest: think Super Mario, but inside your living room, climbing a giant Jenga tower. A little monkey scrambles upward while you help build the path, dodge explosions, and race to reach the top.

Five years ago, a game like this required a 10-person team and a two-to-three-year development cycle. Parker and one developer built it in nine months.

Phase two — vibe coding — is something categorically different. The AI writes directly into the software itself, troubleshoots its own work in real time, and iterates without human intervention at the syntax level. The human’s job shifts from writing and debugging to describing and directing.

That shift, Parker says, represents a 100x leap. And it is the engine behind every project he has shipped in the last 18 months.

For non-developers, the entry point is simpler than it sounds: open a chat window, describe what you want to build, and start a conversation. The AI handles the technical scaffolding. You supply the vision, the taste, and the creative judgment that makes the output worth building in the first place.

How to Encode Your Expert Essence Before AI Scales the Wrong Version of You

The most dangerous thing a creator can do right now is hand their content production over to AI without first installing a governing creative identity underneath it.

Parker’s $50,000 Meta hackathon win with Language IRL is the perfect illustration of why.

The technology that powered that win — Meta’s augmented reality computer vision — was already available to every developer who entered that contest.

The tool was identical.

What was irreplaceable was Parker’s conviction that immersive technology should teach people something real, drawn from 15 years of living at the intersection of art, education, and human experience. Generic AI handed that same technology to a thousand developers.

Artful Intelligence handed it to someone with something specific to say.

That same principle is exactly what Parker watched his father, Park Howell, do with the StoryCycle Genie® — spending years formalizing the Story Cycle System™ into books, frameworks, and a structured methodology, then encoding all of that into an AI system that now scales it at machine speed.

“It’s your editor,” Parker says, “packed with all of your genius, that can fire a billion times a second.”

That is the model. Not AI instead of your expertise. AI governed by your expertise.

The creators who will define the next decade are not the ones who outsource their creative intelligence to AI.

They are the ones who embed their creative intelligence so deeply into AI that every output is unmistakably theirs — and then let the machine scale it at speeds no human team could match.

More About Parker Howell and Howell XR

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Parker Howell’s Conversation With Park Howell on the Business of Story Podcast

Doomsayers Got AI Wrong — Creative Abundance Is the Real Story

Park Howell: Thank you, Parker, for taking over my intro. I appreciate it. And thank you actually for being my guest this week, coming back on the show. The reason why is you have been producing a ton of really remarkable content in the last 18 months that I’m curious if you could have even remotely pulled off without AI to help you get there.

You and I have had a long conversation about AI. I’m working with the Story Cycle Genie. You in the experiential reality, augmented reality, virtual reality world in filmmaking. We both, I think, are AI optimists. I’m not even sure optimist is quite the right word — opportunist and optimist, even as people all around us are doomsaying. It’s going to eliminate humanity in about four years. There’s going to be a huge market bubble bust. We’re all going to die from that as well.

And yet, in the work that you have done, you have shown that AI is really an amplifier, not a slop creator — if you use it correctly. So today you’re going to share with us some of your secrets about how to use AI as artful intelligence to produce some of the cool stuff you’ve done.

Parker: Yeah. No, I think it’s a really great time to jump in and be on this podcast because everything is just changing so fast. You’ve got people who are like, it’s a bubble, it’s all going to fall apart. You’ve got people who are like, no, it’s the most amazing thing ever and it’s going to take all of our jobs and crush humanity. I find myself somewhere in the middle, thinking like, at the end of the day, if you really are playing with these things the right way, it’s just the most incredible tool we’ve ever had.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve had the opportunity to just play with it. We’ve had some really awesome clients who are like, show us what you can do. And everything is just so exponential.

I got into the virtual reality side of the business about a decade ago. Man, things were just so expensive to build, and everything was just taking so much time.

The Trade Show AI Kiosk That Launched Parker Howell’s 100x Creative Journey

Park: And that was really your first step into AI to produce something for one of your global clients. That was a couple of years ago, and it led to a whole host of different projects.

Parker: Cut to about 18 months ago — we brought in a really talented generalist developer who helped us build out an AI kiosk that really helped our client tell their story. Basically what it was is it was connecting to these great AI brains, but then trained on our client’s story and their offerings. So when they were at trade shows, they could bring people up and say, hey, why don’t you tell our little AI assistant here about your business? And this thing will tell you how we can help augment your reality through the use of virtual reality.

Monkey Tower Proves a 2-Person AI Team Can Outbuild a 10-Person Studio

Park: Let me just read through some of what you’ve been building for the last 18 months so our audience can get a sense. You launched your first virtual reality game on Meta called Monkey Tower about a year ago. You produced an app called Language IRL — Language In Real Life — in under 30 days, submitted it in a Meta contest and won fifty thousand dollars. You’ve done experiments with a card game called Rogue. You’ve done things on chess.com, Codenames, Tunorama, Skate Boss. It goes on and on and on.

Parker: Starting with that kiosk was kind of the jumping off point for something I’d wanted to do for a long time — make a virtual reality video game. I had the developer working with me, and while we were waiting for client feedback I was like, alright, I’ve got to keep them busy. Let’s do a prototype. So we started building out Monkey Tower, which is a puzzle platformer. Think of like Super Mario, but in your room on a giant Jenga tower. This little monkey’s climbing up the tower. You’re helping build a way up. Everything’s blowing up. You’re trying to get them to the top.

We put together a prototype and after about two weeks said, wow, this is really fun. We basically just pulled the trigger and said, let’s go.

I would estimate that game five years ago probably would have been a 10-person team, two to three year cycle. The core team we had was me as the tech artist designer, Rico as the gameplay programmer, and then our AI coding assistants as the core two-person team. We basically went from prototype to launch in nine months.

It was just a really epic intro into just how much of a hyperscaler this AI is.

I was really trying to be as hands-off with the code as possible. But I would even get in and have my AI assistants build me tools where, okay, I’ve built the world, but now that world needs to be converted into code that the gameplay can use. And the AI is like, great, boom, got it, let’s do it.

That was really the beginning of being like, okay, when you’re thinking about building AI, you’re really thinking about building yourself tools. Tools that you’ve always dreamed of having, but for whatever reason, there’s no giant enterprise out there who’s building it for you. Now you have this assistant that, boom, 15 minutes later, if you describe it well enough, it’ll kick out the tool for you.

You Don’t Need to Code to Build Custom AI Tools — Monkey Tower Showed Us How

Park: Give us an example. For those of us out here that aren’t film producers and experiential reality producers, what would be one thing we could do right now that you learned from developing Monkey Tower?

Parker: Sure. I’ll give you an example of something really simple that people really love.

When most people think about AI, 99% are using it to replace Google — using it as a search engine, using it to write emails faster. To take it a step beyond that, think of it like this: what if I had a custom piece of software that did something really cool?

This one woman built a piece where she was like, I’m tired of waking up in the morning and having to look at my phone for the news. So she went on to a coding assistant — you could do this in ChatGPT — and just said, hey, make this for me. I want you to every morning print me out on my printer a one-page newspaper. It should follow the people I follow on Instagram, my social media accounts. It should only be the news I want to read. And throw in my Google calendar and tell me what I have to do today. When I wake up in the morning, that thing will print out and I’ll have my own personal newspaper. I don’t have to get it on my phone first thing.

Park: And how hard would something like that be to build?

Parker: If you got Claude or ChatGPT, literally just open up that chat window and type in, hey, I want you to build me a newspaper in the morning. How do I do it? It’ll say, okay, how about if we looked like this and had this functionality? You’d say yes or no, and you’d say, what if you did it some different way?

The thing about it is it’s so conversational. What’s so powerful for me is that being a generalist coder, what really bogs me down is all the troubleshooting, trying to figure out how to wire one thing to another. But nowadays, if you just ask it, it will just figure it all out itself. It’ll run the demo on its side and troubleshoot itself. So all the painful parts are gone. You’re really just left with a conversation that kicks out whatever it is you want. It’s kind of magical.

The Polymath Producer Has an Unfair Advantage in the Age of AI

Park: You came from the film background. Went to Chapman University through the Dodge School of Film program. And I know a lot of your mentors in Hollywood initially were like, Parker, what’s your one thing?

And interestingly enough, your one thing, I think, is this polymath producer. You’ve taken that one-dimensional filmmaking approach — let’s get something on film or digital and edit it together and tell a story — into virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality. You’re going into this dimensional experience. Monkey Tower is a great example. Would have normally taken years and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. Two of you did it in under a year.

Language IRL Won $50,000 in 30 Days and Proved Augmented Reality Language Learning Is Ready

Park: You take it upon yourself before coming out for Christmas to do this contest with Meta that you ultimately ended up winning. Tell us about that.

Parker: We had just wrapped up Monkey Tower, and right at that same time Meta came out and said, hey, we’re doing a big contest. We’ve just dropped some amazing technology over the course of the last year, but not enough people are making cool stuff with it. If you can make something really cool with our new augmented reality systems, our new computer vision — which is basically allowing your augmented goggles to understand the world around you — we want to reward that.

Language IRL was our entry into the hackathon. The hackathon was a one-month event from beginning to end — build a product. What language IRL did is it scanned the world around you and grabbed all the data points of all the identifiers. It would go, okay, there’s a tree over there, there’s a desk, there’s a car, a stop sign. Then a little robot monkey would come out and teach you whatever language you wanted to learn. We launched with French, Spanish, and German.

He’d come out and do a whole language lesson for you. He’d say, okay, here’s this, here’s that. Then at the end he’d quiz you. He’d say, can you point at the chair? And you’d point at the chair — but he’d say it in Spanish.

I’ve always thought that emerging technology, everyone wants to use it for big flashy games. I think that’s fun and cool, but people underestimate how powerful it is from an educational standpoint. When you’re totally immersed in a system, it’s writing to parts of your brain that you don’t normally get if you’re just watching a video or taking a test on paper.

Park: And what did you win for that contest?

Parker: That was a fifty thousand dollar prize. There are so many people like Meta, like Apple, whoever, who are pouring billions upon billions of dollars engineering incredible technology. And then they go, but we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to make it human. That’s where we really step in and go, great, thanks for putting eighty billion dollars towards this. Let’s make something people can really use and enjoy.

Vibe Coding Is Not AI-Assisted Coding — It’s the 100x Creative Amplifier Non-Developers Have Been Waiting For

Park: From building out Language IRL, what did you learn that you can share with our audience?

Parker: This is the stepping off point in the coding. At this point we were really using it to write code and inject it into our thing. We would architect everything, use it, put it in, and test it.

After that experience is when we really went into the mode where we’re having the code not just be written on the outside and injected in, but having the AI coders write directly into the code. Vibe coding is what they’re calling it.

If that first bit of coding was 20-xing our capability, this ability to have the code write directly into the software has really been a 100x. That’s been the most explosive part of this next year.

For people at home, if there’s any kind of problem you’d want to have fixed in the digital space, just having a conversation with your AI about how to build it can build it.

Building a Custom AI CRM From Scratch Proves Entrepreneurs Don’t Need Off-the-Shelf Software Anymore

Parker: Another piece we’ve been using that is applicable for a lot of businesses is to just have your AI code you a CRM. I’ve had a lot of success since moving to Austin just finding different business partners who are really local. So I have basically, inside AI, this is what I’m looking for in a business partner, this is the offering that I would have for these people, this is the offering that would be most aligned with these people. And you feed that all into your AI and say, hey, build me a Google Drive that’s a CRM of all the people and organizations you think I should reach out to.

It will just build you that tool from scratch. You come back 30 minutes later and you’ve got a hundred different prospects, all with different levels of what you should engage them on.

Park Howell Built His Own AI Story Coaching App in a Half-Day Using Vibe Coding

Park: You helped me build something for myself — a story audition tool using the And But Therefore and the five primal elements of a short story for big impact. You kind of showed me and I kept saying, well, what about this, Parker? What about that? And you said, no, just go do it, Dad. Just ask it and do it.

I tell Claude, here’s what I am trying to build. It took several iterations. Probably because I’m not the best vibe coder in the world, but I did in a very short amount of time create a very powerful app. Someone learning our story frameworks can then speak back into the app and it will coach them on where it’s strong and where the gaps are. That was a really fun half-day exercise.

And when I look at AI, I am an optimist. You had turned me on to a book called The Master Switch, which covers the history of communications — telegraph, newspapers, radio, TV, cable TV, the internet, to now AI. There’s always doomsayers across the board, and it’s often just to get regulation in, to get the government to step in so only a few can really profit from it.

And you had turned me on to the All-In podcast, which talked about the other side of those doomsayers — very bullish on AI and what it’s going to do for us.

In my world, primarily writing and brand story development, I love AI. I have produced more really great content this year than probably the past 10 years because of our Story Cycle Genie and using AI. I even get people writing me — just yesterday with my new newsletter, Brand Story Ops for agencies on LinkedIn, a guy wrote and said, what a marvelously written article. I collaborated with the genie to be able to do that. That article would have probably taken me two days to write. With the genie, it took about four hours.

Encoding Your Expert Essence Into AI Is the Only Way to Scale Your Genius Without Producing Slop

Parker: I would turn it back and look at what you’ve done with AI, Park. The pushback that a lot of people are talking about is slop. No one wants slop. Everyone goes, my gosh, look at these untalented people creating this awful stuff. It’s everywhere and I’m drowning in it.

What you’ve done with the Story Cycle Genie is what everyone who’s an expert in the world should be doing with AI — how do you take your expert capabilities and put them into a system that is now hundred-x, thousand-x scaled? That’s what your genie has done so well.

When you were young, everything was so intuitive. Then you became a professor and you were like, okay, I have to write this stuff down. How do I actually come up with all these ideas about people’s brands? So you formalized it, built this whole approach, wrote several books on it. Then you took all of that and embedded it into a genie.

What it does is it’s kind of your editor. You come to it with your idea and then the editor has all of your genius packed into a thing that can fire a billion times a second. It helps clean it up, clarify it. You’ll still catch something — you go, no, that’s not exactly what I want to say. You clarify it and then, boom, you have a really nice product.

The thing is, trying to capture your expert essence inside of something that can be your assistant — and can also outlive you, can be kind of your legacy — but can also allow you to scale.

It must be exhausting for you, all these clients coming in, having to sit and focus on their brand and their offering. But now you’re like, great, do a first run with my AI, then I’ll meet with you and we’ll dissect it and see what’s working. I think that was a big inspiration for me early on — what you’re building isn’t just slop, but has real value and has that real human piece to it.

Anyone out there today who’s really found themselves as an expert should be trying to figure out: how do I encode this into something that’s scalable?

Howell XR Built an AI Photo Booth for ACL in 2 Days for $40 — This Is the New Creative Economy

Park: Let’s jump into the Howell XR Laboratory and tell us about some of your small science experiments with AI.

Parker: Right now we’ve got an AI photo booth that we’ve built. What it’s really been for us is kind of a flagship of both using AI to build something, but then also giving people a front-end experience.

We take it out to parties, we take it out to corporate events. We’ve got ACL coming up — a big collab with Austin City Limits, a big concert that takes over Austin for two weeks. Salt Traders, the big Jack Allen restaurant right on the corner, throws a big tailgate pre-game party. They were like, dude, this is exactly what we want.

Basically the experience of the AI photo booth is you come up, it takes your photo, and then it turns you into a tune — we’re calling it Tunorama. It’s a caricature. It really pulls out your best characteristics and kind of pushes them. It can do that in 20 seconds.

We have AI models that can do more advanced photorealistic interpretations. Those take a little bit longer. But we’re doing a wedding in October — they’ve got the option for their caricature, or they’ve got this really fun psychedelic spirit animal aura reader that, when you hit it, next thing you know you’ve got light rays shooting out of your heart.

Park: You can take the man out of Hollywood, but you can’t take the Hollywood out of the man.

Parker: Yeah. The first party we put it at, I just had it in the corner and waited for this seven-year-old kid to walk up and press the button. His eyes were just huge. He’s like, holy crap. Then he grabbed all his friends and they’re all posing, doing all this stuff. It was just a riot.

Just being able to build stuff that really has that shared space element — hey, everyone come together, let’s play with this thing — that’s really exciting for me.

Park: How long did it take you to create Tunorama? And how long would it have taken two years ago?

Parker: The very first one I did in two days. That was with a twenty dollar a month subscription. I might have put another twenty dollars in at some point.

Park: So you’re forty bucks in, two days in. What would that have taken two or three years ago?

Parker: A year ago, even having some AI assistance, I had basically earmarked about thirty thousand dollars to build. And even using AI from 18 months ago, I think we’re still looking at maybe six to eight weeks.

Parker Howell Rebuilt a 150-Sound Soundboard in 10 Minutes — AI Speed Is Now a Creative Superpower

Park: Wouldn’t it be awesome to bring a whole bunch of sound effects to the Codenames card game? So I did. I spent several days going online pulling sound effects and music — buzzers, wrong answer noises, right answer noises, talking smack songs, clips from movies. And we found that people love pushing the buttons making sound effects even more than the card game itself.

I had been working in Stream Deck with it. It was kinda clunky. So that’s when Parker said, hey Dad, send me everything you got, all your assets, and you create it.

Parker: You had gathered all the sound effects and made images for all the sounds. A hundred and fifty different sound files — it was so over the top, it was awesome. I basically put it all into my ChatGPT Codex and it one-shotted something very usable.

It was a soundboard. Each category had good, bad, music. And then just a few more clicks — okay, make sure all the buttons stay on one page, I need this to be a web app I can use on my phone, make sure everything scales so it works on your phone. They had just come out with a new feature where they’ll host your web app inside the software. So you just go publish it. Great. Boom. Send me the link. Next thing you know the entire soundboard with all of your images is just working on my phone. I sent it to you and you’re able to use it.

You take a game, you want to augment it a little bit. We put it on projector so it was projected big. People could have their big stick and point up at the board and go, this is really fun, this is almost like a game show. You’re like, we need sounds. Great, let’s do sounds. Once you get a little sense for AI underneath you, the whole world can be a game show.

Park: The cool thing is AI made it way better, but it still took the human interaction. I literally had to go find the sound effects. Mark Ferguson, my buddy, hung out afterwards for another three hours going, hey, what about this song? You need Beastie Boys. We went down and just started collecting more sounds.

So it made a simple one-dimensional card game into this very experiential reality. It took the human touch — finding the sounds, editing them, cleaning them up, putting them into Stream Deck. Then you took it and said, AI, make this even cooler.

The one thing I learned from Stream Deck was it was good to add a two-second fade to each sound so they weren’t abrupt. And to be able to crossfade sound effects and music. What we learned accidentally by playing it — people controlling the deck were having a lot of fun almost making their own sound experience. You might push Clint Eastwood saying, do you feel lucky, punk? Then push We Are the Champions. It crossfades and you’ve got this whole new audio experience.

Parker: And I will say, I tried to one shot it without any of your sound effects — just told it to go find some fun sound effects. It wasn’t good. It found a bunch of crap. But you had already collected all the funny stuff and I said, here’s the funny stuff, and it’s like, okay, great, now I know what to do with it.

Parker’s Chess.com AI Puzzle Engine Proves Every Creator Can Build and Own a Custom Tool

Parker: What ends up happening when you’re vibe coding is the AI is thinking and you’re sitting there going, okay, well, what am I going to do while it’s thinking? So I started playing chess. I had a really great game and sent it over to my buddy who’s also a chess fan. He goes, that’s so cool. He’s like, I’ve always wanted a chess app that could track all the games you play online, make lessons for you based off the games you played, and make puzzles for you.

I was like, hmm, I wonder if that’s doable. Here’s a little trick for beginner to intermediate AI coders — go and see if an app you already use has an API for it. Basically an API is just a way of talking to it. So my first thing, I went over to my codex and said, does chess.com have an API that we could access? And it said, yes, it does.

Can we make an application that would pull all of my chess games and build puzzles for it using their API? And also, what kind of brain do I need to install to have an engine that understands chess well enough to find these interesting positions? Chat goes back: API able to access your games — which are held publicly on chess.com — we can do that. Also, the great Stockfish chess engine is completely open source. So are you ready to build this app? I click yes.

Fifteen minutes later I have an app. It opens up, goes, what’s your chess.com account handle? I type it in. You have 360 games on chess.com. Let’s crunch them. About 15 minutes later it had looked at every game I’d played and built me like 500 different chess puzzles categorized by: is this a king attack? Is this a fork? All these different categories.

I started playing it and it was amazing. One of the things chess players love about chess is finding something incredibly beautiful in the moment — a series of tactics where everything comes together. You sacrifice your queen, but then this whole set of moves happens and you get a checkmate. It’s beautiful. This app looked at all the games I had and showed me all these moments of beauty that were just existing in games I’d already played. In so doing, in training it, I’m learning to find the beauty of this game.

SkateBoss Went From Idea to Print-Ready Card Game Prototype in 24 Hours Thanks to AI

Park: Let’s talk about the use of AI to help create a game that your wife, Jackie, came up with. It was like, while you were doing the whole Meta thing, she and like overnight invented this card game with physical cards. You all came out here to Mun’s Park in Arizona for Christmas and we played the prototype. You have since then built it out as a legit card playing game using a lot of AI in the creation of the imagery. Take us through Skate Boss.

Parker: In the same way that I found your work with the Story Cycle Genie super inspiring, I’ve always found my wife’s approach to her business — real estate and roller skating — really inspiring. She’s like, I have ADD, so I need to have systems for everything. And when AI came out, that became her hyperscaler.

We’re playing a card game that we won at a friend’s Christmas holiday party. Jackie and I get excited playing it. She’s like, I’ve always wanted to make a card game. I want to make a card game about roller skaters.

So we went down to Town Lake and had Akira, our daughter, in the stroller and we’re just walking around the lake. We basically talked about all the fun, interesting parts of being a roller skate entertainment boss. All the funny things that come with auditioning for these jobs, getting these funny different jobs where they need roller skaters at their party or their TV commercial. And all the weird personalities that come with it.

This game emerged. It came down to five different types of genres of roller skater: the artistic skater, which is kind of like a figure skater. The groove skaters, which are that disco seventies vibe. The derby skaters — action-packed, hyper-aggressive. The influencers, which are really fun because their points are a bit lower. And then the jam skaters, which are like the really badass break dancers with roller skates.

You combine the top and bottom of the skater, two different cards, you play the moves and you go out for jobs. But watch out — all the other skate bosses are building their teams and trying to compete for the same jobs. People are throwing shade right and left. You’re trying to win the most job points to win the game.

Jackie just started working in Canva and generating images with ChatGPT for skaters. She stayed up all night long and built like a hundred and forty skate cards. She might have slept for half an hour, then we got on a plane and flew to Arizona, and she had them printed out. Within 24 hours of conception we had a total beta test of this game.

We were kind of shocked at how well it worked just right out of the box. For the past nine months we’ve been playtesting with different friends, finding what the pain points are and honing it in. About a month ago we finally said, okay, this is the deck, these are the cards. Built up our whole spreadsheet of what the final deck was going to be.

Then we started building it in Adobe After Effects, which is generally considered motion graphic software. But I was able to take my skill set from Hollywood of building these graphics packages where everything’s kind of modular — you build a template for something, and then you can rapidly iterate. I have 25 of those cards. Now that I have the template, I generate the image of the new skater and feed it in.

What was really powerful about it is we were able to take our coding assistants and write code for After Effects where we could literally take our spreadsheet and copy and paste all the data in. After Effects built all the cards.

Park: It just occurred to me — your experience 10, 15 years ago with Dancing with the Stars and producing all those graphics has come full circle for you. Now Skate Boss.

Parker: I feel like I unwittingly have designed my entire career for this moment in time. All of these different skill sets are just coming together where it’s all the humanity that’s needed with this kind of hyperscaler AI. I’m just looking at Jackie going, it’s our time to be prolific. I know it. I know we don’t have enough time. I know we have a newborn child. But we just need to be building stuff at this kind of pace right now.

We’re sending it off to the printers today. We found a printer out in Florida and distribution out there. We’re launching it and we want those first decks in people’s hands for Christmas.

The Golden Era of Human Creativity Has Arrived — Start Playing With AI Before You Feel Ready

Park: Let’s wrap up with a question you see everywhere — the AI whining. Oh gosh, AI’s going to take my job. Or I don’t want to share too much with AI because it’s going to take my intellect. People won’t need me anymore because AI will do my job for them. What do you tell people about how to overcome the AI stigma?

Parker: You know, if you were in an industry or had a job and you were going, man, this is not as safe as it once was, I would just look at how you could use this technology to make yourself maybe not a hundred times more efficient, but what if you were three times more efficient? It seems really daunting until you realize you just talk to it. You just go, hey, look, I’m a real estate agent. How can you help me? Hey, I work in sales. How can you make me 100% more effective?

If you just take the opportunity right now to get out ahead of it, you’re going to be so much further ahead than everyone else. I think as long as you’re using it and finding ways to make yourself more powerful, there’s a great opportunity in it.

I think there are a million ways to make slop. You need to avoid that where you can. But also you can’t just not use it because you’re afraid of making some slop. Just go make some slop. Don’t show it to anyone, but just play with it. Make some slop, test it out. Then one idea will lead into another. You’ll think about that idea you had 10 years ago that was always just an idea. And now that you kind of understand this tool, maybe it could tackle that.

If we’re going to lean into the concept of AI optimist, for me, what it’s forced me to do is just think so much bigger than I’ve ever thought. And I don’t think that’s an easy thing to do. Like the neuroplasticity of thinking — the world’s going to be so much bigger and more epic and more of an adventure than we ever thought it could be.

This thing’s going to cure cancer. It’s going to put people on a base on the moon or living at the bottom of the ocean. We just have to think of a world that’s so much bigger. And if we can imagine and live into this bigger world, there should be no lack of jobs and people required to bring that into existence.

Obviously there are risks associated with that. But what amazing technology doesn’t have a bunch of risks? If it’s something super powerful, there are going to be risks. All I can do is say, this is really awesome stuff to create with. I’m going to try and bring the humanity to it and make experiences that really uplift people and get them thinking: hey, the future can be really exciting if we make it.

To the Next Generation: Find What You Love, Balance Screens With Life, and Create

Park: Your daughter Akira turns one year old next week. What is the one thing you want to tell her on her first birthday about what the world holds for her now that this evolution of AI is here?

Parker: Man, I think I would just tell her what you told me as a kid — find something you really love to do and just go out and do it and explore.

With regards to the AI, find a balance. Maybe we’ve spent enough time on the computer, maybe it’s time to go outside, touch some grass, play a game, go on a hike. That balance to me is what life is. All this stuff, it’s not meant to replace your friends and your community. You’re not supposed to just be sucked in a VR headset 24 hours a day. But it can be a place to go and experiment and build stuff and be creative and then go back and share it with your friends.

Just trying to give her that full embodiment of this existence and trying to let her find her own creative outlook, whatever that may be.

Park: Well awesome, Parker. It’s always great to have you here on the Business of Story. Thanks for coming today and sharing your work and your insights on AI and your tips on how to help our listeners and watchers use AI to have some fun in their life.

Parker: Well thanks so much for having me and thanks for all the inspiration over the years. Looking forward to seeing you out here.

Park: Me too.

Parker: All right. Well thanks for having me. Take care, Dad.

Frequently Asked Questions About AI, Artful Intelligence, and Vibe Coding

Q: What Is Artful Intelligence and How Is It Different From Artificial Intelligence?

A: Artful Intelligence is the practice of encoding your unique expertise, creative vision, and irreplaceable human perspective into AI systems so the output amplifies your genius rather than averaging it into generic slop. Where artificial intelligence by itself produces a statistical mean of everything it has ingested, Artful Intelligence puts you — the expert, the storyteller, the 100x creator — in the director’s chair. Park Howell developed this concept to describe the shift from fearing AI as a replacement to embracing it as a creative abundance machine that does the heavy lifting while you supply the irreplaceable human soul. Artful Intelligence is not a technology; it is a mindset, and it is the defining creative philosophy of our era.

Q: What Is Vibe Coding and How Can Non-Developers Use It to Build Their Own Tools?

A: Vibe coding is the practice of describing what you want to build in plain conversational language and letting AI write the entire application directly — no traditional coding, no debugging, no developer bottleneck. You act as the creative director, not the programmer, which means your vision drives the output and the AI handles every line of execution. Parker Howell used vibe coding to build a VR game with a 2-person team in 9 months, win a $50,000 Meta hackathon, and create custom business tools from scratch — all through natural language direction. For non-developers and entrepreneurs, vibe coding is the entry point to becoming a 100x creator: if you can articulate what you want with clarity and specificity, you can now build almost anything.

Q: How Did Parker Howell Win $50,000 in a Meta Hackathon in Just 30 Days?

A: Parker Howell won the Meta hackathon prize by building Language IRL, an augmented reality language learning app that immerses users in real-world AR environments to teach vocabulary and conversational phrases contextually. Working with AI-powered vibe coding tools, Parker’s team designed, built, and shipped a polished, functional app within the 30-day competition window — a timeline that would have been unthinkable without AI as a creative amplifier. The win validated a core principle of Artful Intelligence: when you encode creative expertise into AI and direct it with precision, you compress years of development into weeks. Language IRL also proved that augmented reality language learning is not a future concept but a present-day competitive advantage for immersive education.

Q: What Is the Difference Between AI-Assisted Coding and Vibe Coding?

A: AI-assisted coding means using tools like GitHub Copilot to suggest functions, autocomplete lines, or help debug — you are still a developer living inside the code. Vibe coding means you describe the desired outcome in natural language and AI writes the entire program into the application environment, shifting your role entirely from coder to creative director. Parker Howell describes the leap from AI-assisted coding to vibe coding as a 100x amplification — it removes the technical barrier entirely and lets creative vision, not syntax knowledge, drive what gets built. The key difference is authorship of direction versus authorship of execution: in vibe coding, you own the vision and AI owns the labor.

Q: How Do You Encode Your Expertise Into AI Without Producing Generic AI Slop?

A: Encoding your expertise into AI means feeding your system the proprietary frameworks, signature voice, battle-tested methodology, and hard-won insights that only you possess — so every output carries your irreplaceable fingerprint, not a generic internet average. Park Howell did exactly this with the StoryCycle Genie®, training AI on the full Story Cycle System™ so it delivers brand storytelling guidance that thinks and sounds like Park, not like a chatbot with a thesaurus. The rule is specificity: the more precisely you encode your unique frameworks, constraints, and creative logic into an AI system, the more it amplifies your genius rather than diluting it into slop. Slop is what happens when creators use AI as a shortcut; Artful Intelligence is what happens when they use it as a force multiplier for their deepest expertise.

Q: What Is the Biggest Threat to Creators in the Age of AI — and How Do You Avoid It?

A: The biggest threat to creators in the AI age is not replacement — it is homogenization. When everyone uses the same AI tools with the same generic prompts, the output becomes indistinguishable AI slop that floods every channel and devalues creative work across the board. Parker Howell and Park Howell both argue that the creators who will win are those who encode their distinct lived experience, proprietary thinking, and creative vision into AI — making it a 100x amplifier of something irreplaceable rather than a factory for sameness. The antidote to AI slop is not avoiding AI but mastering Artful Intelligence: use AI to scale what only you can offer, and you become uncopyable.

Q: How Do You Start Using AI as a Creative Tool If You Have Zero Coding Experience?

A: The single best move for a creator with no coding experience is to pick a project you actually care about and start describing what you want to build to a conversational AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT — then iterate from there without waiting to feel ready. Parker Howell, founder of Howell XR, built a custom CRM, a VR game, an AR language learning app, and a live-event AI photo booth all through plain-language prompting and vibe coding, with no traditional developer background required. Park Howell built his own ABT story coaching app — encoding the five primal elements framework into a working tool — in half a day using the same conversational approach. The secret is not technical skill; it is creative specificity and the willingness to make some slop first, because the golden era for 100x AI optimists is waiting on the other side of that first experiment.

Q: What Is the Story Cycle System™ and How Does Park Howell Use AI to Scale It?

A: The Story Cycle System™ is Park Howell’s proprietary business storytelling framework built on the ABT (And, But, Therefore) narrative structure and five primal story elements, designed to help brands, marketers, and entrepreneurs craft compelling stories that drive action and build lasting audience connection. Park encoded the entire Story Cycle System™ into the StoryCycle Genie®, an AI-powered tool that delivers his methodology interactively — scaling his decades of brand storytelling expertise to an unlimited audience without requiring Park in the room. This is Artful Intelligence in its purest form: a framework forged through hard-won creative experience, amplified by AI without losing the human insight at its core. For marketers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders serious about business storytelling, the Story Cycle System™ and its AI integration represent the convergence of proven narrative science and cutting-edge creative technology.

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