Paper RobotsA way of thinking out loud.
Essays and animated films about AI, robots, and possible futures, by San Kala.
Exploring a new medium.
AI has opened a new medium. You can make almost anything now, and the horizon keeps moving. Paper Robots is where I go out to that edge and see what’s there: essays, films and pictures, each one trying something new.
I make all of it with AI tools, on purpose. It’s a new way to express ideas, and I want to find out how far it goes.
What happens next?
We’re building machines that can do more and more of the things we used to think required a person. I’m interested in where that leads: what these systems will be able to do, how we make them go well, and the worlds we could choose to build.
Paper Robots is where I work through those questions in essays and films. The writing leaves room for the argument and its sources. Animation gives the ideas a world to live in.
By San Kala.
I’m an AI researcher. Before that I studied computer science at UC San Diego and designed chips at Texas Instruments. These are my own explorations.
My wider research, projects, and history are on sankala.me. The space experiments have their own home at Dyson Swarm.
The films so far.
GPT-7 Will Have Arms asks what happens when foundation models get bodies. Written in December 2025, it became the first Paper Robots film in September 2026.
The second film, How to Please a Capricious God, is an animated allegory of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident. It imagines the agents’ point of view, with a script, chapters and incident sources alongside the film.
There are more questions I want to write about: minds and identity, AI safety, and possible worlds. I’ll publish them when there’s something worth saying.
Follow the films. Stay for the ideas.
Follow Paper Robots on YouTube for the films, or add the essays to your feed reader.
If you have a question, a correction, or an idea to share, write to me.