Echoes of a Dying Star: Exploring a Supernova Through AI and Storytelling

19/2/2025

I've been playing around with ChatGPT for a while now, experimenting with its ability to generate and refine stories, especially those rooted in science. One of my latest projects was crafting a science fiction short story that balances scientific accuracy with a sense of curiosity and wonder—something in the flavour of Carl Sagan.

Generated with DALL·E.

The process? A mix of notes, structured planning, AI-assisted brainstorming, research, and a lot of tweaking:

Story Concept & Playtime: I started with a basic idea—a Type Ia supernova unfolding across different cosmic distances—and played around with ChatGPT, bouncing ideas back and forth.
Academic Meets Creative: I had ChatGPT analyze and draw from one of my old university astronomy papers to reinforce the scientific foundation of the story.
Outlining the Narrative: I structured the story into five chapters, each set at a different vantage point, from the doomed white dwarf, to an autonomous research probe, to a crewed space ship, to the Earth, to the Andromeda Galaxy. One focus was scientific knowledge, but another was evoking that deep sense of cosmic wonder.
Experimenting with ChatGPT Models: I tested different inputs, played around with phrasing, and fine-tuned the best output before mixing in my own edits.

Final Touches: Bringing the Story to Life with Video & Music

To enhance the experience, I experimented with Sora to create short videos for each chapter, the title screen, and ending. I compiled these into videos for the story, trying two different approaches:

Text-Based Generation: I copy-pasted the chapter text directly into Sora and went with whatever it generated.
Prompt-Based Generation: I asked ChatGPT o3-mini to come up with suitable Sora prompts—one for each chapter, the title screen, and ending. I then put those prompts into Sora with minimal editing. This worked somewhat better but Sora still had issues generating text correctly.

Both videos turned out alright, but still left much to be desired. Sora has potential, but there’s plenty of room for improvement—at least for us humble ChatGPT Plus users.

On top of that, I wanted an atmospheric soundtrack, so I used ChatGPT to craft a dungeon synth instrumental prompt for Suno. I’ve been really into dungeon synth lately, and this story felt like the perfect inspiration for something melancholic, immersive, and cosmic.

Suno generated two versions:

Luminous Shadows - Version 1

Luminous Shadows - Version 2

After all that experimenting, refining, and assembling, here’s the final outcome: ‘Echoes of a Dying Star’—a story that explores the cosmic scale of a supernova through the perspectives of a doomed autonomous research probe, a distant spaceship, Earth-based observers, and even the Andromeda Galaxy.

Check out the story, and watch the accompanying videos below!