"No AI. No AI." (Scene: 19:40)
Chewy in Cardboard StarWars steals our heart.
Secondhand Movie Co, If Star Wars had a $10 Budget, Full Movie. Embedded from the creators’ YouTube channel.
In the era of AI-generated slop videos, Secondhand Movie Co made Star Wars: A New Hope out of cardboard and love. The improvised props look great, the effects cheerfully handmade, but above all, the desert scenes raise an uncomfortable question: did George Lucas really need to go all the way to Tunisia? LA appears to work just fine. The joke is not even that far from the original production method. Luke’s lightsaber hilt began life as a camera flash handle. Humans made this production, not some synthetic Tilly Norwood cast. No generative video. No synthetic actors. No prompt engineering. Just cardboard, ingenuity, and a bunch of friends having lots of fun. Then, of course, Chewy steals the show. Next: The Empire Freaking Strikes Back.
Further Reading
AI Assistance Statement ▾
A near daily publishing pace is possible because AI tools do a substantial share of the work between the idea and the published text. Preparation of this entry included assistance from Anthropic's Claude and from OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-5 series reasoning models). I use them to research a topic and gather primary sources, to organize ideas and propose structure, to draft and revise prose, to check factual claims against the cited sources before publication, and to score drafts against a set of house style rules. Longer pieces are often developed across several sessions. A written handover carries the argument, sources, and open questions from one session to the next, and the same tools help prepare those handovers. The tools also help identify candidate images and confirm that selected images appear to be released for reuse, for example through public domain or Creative Commons licensing.
A fuller explanation of the editorial process appears in How I Use AI to Write This Blog. This process is also an AI experiment in its own right. There is a live argument about what AI-assisted writing does to originality, and whether the result is thought or slop; a noteworthy example is the August 2026 dispute over a Wall Street Journal op-ed that its author acknowledged drafting with AI, and the Journal's subsequent defense of the practice (WSJ is behind a paywall, but for a public summary: click here, and here). I would rather run the experiment openly than pretend it is not happening. This blog is one sustained attempt to find out whether a person with an argument, working with these tools every day, produces writing that is still recognizably that person's, and I disclose the method so readers can judge the result.
The judgment is mine. I choose the topic, decide the argument, supply the personal and professional experience the pieces draw on, read and edit every draft, verify the sources and image licensing, and take full responsibility for the final published content. Where a post contains my own recollections, the AI did not invent them.
Statement revised September 2026.