This isn't a usual post. With every bad thing, I try to find something good that can come out of it. This time what I stumbled onto was something like AI video therapy, and how it might help people through things they can't put into words. The catch is that I was the lab rat.
Some people knit when they're distressed. I build and create technology. I enjoy it, it's my happy place, and surprising things often come out of it.
Recently I watched a 29-year-old man named Ramon Harris be murdered on the Atlanta Beltline.
For anyone unfamiliar with Atlanta, this is one of the most affluent, heavily trafficked stretches of the city. It is not a place you expect this.
I was part of the small mob of people who kept the man with the knife there until police arrived, while someone tried to help Ramon. It was a lost cause. I won't go into the details, but I watched this young man die.
I went back to the scene once afterward, to help myself process it. A memorial had gone up. This weekend I went back again. It had grown, but the flowers were dead and there was a waterlogged teddy bear sitting in the middle of it. He deserved better than that.
So I went into the Kroger where it happened, bought as many flowers as I could carry, and asked the security guard if I could redo the memorial. He nodded.
After arranging them, I realized the bucket someone was using as a vase had no water in it. I went back into the Kroger, bought water, and on my way out the guard stopped me and accused me of stealing it. Several rude comments followed. I asked him where he'd been the day Ramon was killed. He called me a coward and asked where I'd been.
Considering where I actually was, you can imagine how that could have gone. I left instead.
All morning I'd been taking pictures without really knowing why. On the way home, I kept thinking about how easy it would have been for that guard to help a stranger fixing a memorial that was falling apart. And then I thought about the family.
I've spent years behind cameras and drones, and lately I've been getting good with AI video tools. It occurred to me I might put both to use and make something that would give Ramon's family a better day than the one they were having, if it ever found its way to them.
So I fed the photos into my AI agent, told it the whole story, and we worked up a handful of scenes to tie the images together. Something that could be understood in a minute, or at least felt in a minute. Then I spent a few hours generating those scenes, fixing what the AI got wrong, and cutting it together.
What came out surprised me. It was made for them, but making it did something for me too. Seeing the experience shaped into a story made it easier to look at. Which made me wonder whether the most interesting thing about this technology isn't what it produces for us, but what it helps us process.
We talk endlessly about AI writing code and replacing jobs. Those are the obvious applications. But what about experiences too painful to explain on our own? Could a clinician one day use this to help someone turn scattered memories into something they can begin to work with?
I don't know. I do know it needs care. There's early research on this, and also evidence that AI-generated imagery can quietly reshape what a person remembers.
After I made the video, I went looking to see whether anyone else had been here. A few have. In Arizona last year, the family of Chris Pelkey, a veteran killed in a road rage shooting, built an AI video of him to play at his killer's sentencing. His sister said the hours spent making it were part of her healing. Art therapists like Jocelyn Fitzgerald, who also trains clinicians in EMDR, are already using AI image tools with trauma clients who feel too self-conscious to draw. And the technique I stumbled into has a name in clinical practice. It's called imagery rescripting, and therapists have used it for years to help people revisit a memory and give it a shape they can live with.
I wasn't trying to discover a use for AI that morning. I was trying to replace some dead flowers.
Rest in peace, Ramon.
