Data Scientist Hilary Mason on AI and the Future of Fiction

In this podcast, Motley Fool host Rich Lumelleau and data scientist Hilary Mason discuss:

• How her company, Hidden Door, uses generative AI to turn any work of fiction into an online social roleplaying game.
• Whether Napster is a fair comparison.
• What the future of storytelling could look like.

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on July 13, 2025.

Hilary Mason: I think the future of entertainment looks really different, and that it actually doesn't matter where the idea begins.

Dan Boyd: That's Hillary Mason, the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. They use generative AI to turn any work of fiction into an online social role-playing game. Our Rich Lumelleau talks to Mason about all that this entails, including their Pride and Prejudice adaptation and parallels to Napster.

Rich Lumelleau: Let's jump in where we are today. As I mentioned at the top, you're the CEO and co-founder of Hidden Door. Tell us about Hidden Door. Tell us about the thought process behind starting it, what it does and what your role is there.

Hilary Mason: Yes. What we do at Hidden Door is we partner with people who create worlds through movies, books, TV shows, or online communities, all of that really wonderful world-building energy, and we create ways for the fans to role-play in those worlds. We do use AI and machine learning to make that possible, and our fans get to come in, create their own characters and role-play their own stories with a really light stat system. Where they get challenge, surprise, they get to be creative, and it's all within the rules of the world, the rules of the IP. If there are characters from those worlds that appear, we enforce all the rules around how those characters ought to behave. This is a way for fans to fan-fick as a game, stay excited about the thing that they love. I don't know about you, but when I finish reading a book, I usually have 20 different ideas for different plots or corners of that world I would have loved to explore, and to really do that in a way that reinforces and supports the authors and creators they admire. That's what we do at Hidden Door, but there is a long story about how we got here.

Rich Lumelleau: Love to hear it. Absolutely. That's question number 2 I have for you.

Hilary Mason: The abbreviated version is that I've been working in this area of tech that is now called generative AI and a more broad take on it. For a very long time, I went to grad school for machine learning. I've been a computer science professor, realized I was very mediocre at that, but I really love building things and I love building products for people. I ended up moving back to New York City, which is where I'm right now, also where I grew up, and joining a company called Bitly which was just starting at the time, and we made short links on social media before social media was really a thing. I had the job there of Chief Scientist, which, by the way, is the best job title anyone can ever have, because you have no real responsibilities other than to invent the future business opportunity for the company. Bitly was just short links on social media, and my job was to figure out how to use that dataset to create a business. It is the most fun I've ever had. But that led me to start exploring language modeling and figuring out what people were paying attention to across the social web around the world. We built a lot of cool stuff.

Then I founded a company called Fast Forward Labs in 2014, and our very first project, we did our own applied AI research, was on language generation, and we built a prototype that wrote real estate ads. You would put in structured data like two bedroom apartment near the park, and it would write the ad where it would be like, this sun-filled home near transit will be your family's escape. That really got me thinking about the power and let's say, the perils of generating text and transforming text. I'll skip a bunch of stuff that happened in the middle. But Cloudera acquired Fast Forward. We built a bunch of scaled enterprise applications using embeddings and text modeling, that is essentially computable ways to understand and model information. The whole time, I was thinking, all of the things that are limitations in doing this in an enterprise environment with standards for fax and things like that are assets. If we think about storytelling, if we think about creating a palette of options and letting people pick the ones or rewrite them or continue gaming adventures. I started hidden door with my co-founder, Matt Brandwein five years ago, with the idea that we were just at the beginning of the technical window, and this was well before ChatGPT, where we might be able to build a product like this, and let's see where we can go with it. Now here we are five years later. We have a product in Early Access. If anyone wants to play it, go to hiddendoor.co and sign up for the waitlist. We'll get on in. It's been really incredible to see it all come together.

Rich Lumelleau: Let's say I finish reading a book and I think, man, I would love to take this to the next level, and I contact you folks at Hidden Door. Do I come to you with the idea and we figure out how to do things, or do we get in touch with the author or the show creator?

Hilary Mason: We work with the author and the creators, and we have signed agreements with them to build games in their world. We really want to do this from a place of respect and essentially building more value for them, helping them encourage their communities and fans to stay involved in the world. That's the strategy we've decided on. For any world where we have that partnership, you can come in as a player and start to make your own characters and tell your own stories, which you can then share and other people can build on as well.

Rich Lumelleau: It's almost like from the perspective of the author or the creator, this is a chance to engage directly with fans and presumably another revenue stream for them.

Hilary Mason: Exactly. That's the sales pitch. Keep your fans active. We respect all the rules of the world. This is not just an LLM wrapper, and it gives the fans a way to engage, that is blessed. It's real, and where they also have the ability to be creative and have their own adventures.

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Rich Lumelleau: Obviously, Hidden Door is bringing together storytelling authors, creators, as well as through the lens of AI.

Hilary Mason: Yes.

Rich Lumelleau: It hasn't always been the case that those two domains are seen as complimentary. It sounds like we know what the pitch to the authors is, but do you ever get pushback like, no, I don't want my baby presented in that way?

Hilary Mason: Well, not that thing. I talk to skeptical people all the time, and the skepticism is right. If you look at the market, and you look at what most people are running around excited about, they're saying things like, we don't need authors anymore. I'm just going to ask ChatGPT or I'm going to ask Cloud, and they're write the next novel for me. That's not true, and it's not what I think any of us want. It's not what matters. But, yes, I talk to skeptics all the time, and if we really think about where that comes from, it comes from the fact that many of these large language models have been built off of the author's work without their permission or even their knowledge in many cases.

Rich Lumelleau: Sure.

Hilary Mason: I've written a book or two. That they're in there, too. I don't mind in the sense that it's not how I make my living, but if you've written anything on fool.com, it's probably in there as well. That is not necessarily right, and so there is a real ethical and principle reason for authors to be skeptical, and it is because of the actual behavior of many of the companies in the market, how a lot of the tech is built, and I have to say here, not ours at Hidden Door, but many of the people in the market are doing that, and how would they know the difference unless they talk to us? I think one of the most important questions of the moment is separating out the technology itself and then thinking about the sociotechnical way that we relate to the technology, thinking about what our values are and how do we build tech and businesses that align with our values and are honest about where the data comes from, what we're using it for, what transformations happen? You could also say that I myself am a skeptic of a lot of the generative AI market. If that's not obvious, I'll just say it out loud and clearly, because I think it's gone in a less than ideal direction, but I'm trying very much through our work at Hidden Door and our work with authors and creators to show a way that it could be done that is respectful and is values aligned and is revenue aligned, as well, because values are one thing, but it's important to put your money where your values are. This isn't a perfect analogy, but as I've read about Hidden Door, this almost brings me back call it 25 or so years when Napster came on the scene. It's this great chance to create community, and we can all access the music with one big flaw. The musicians got nothing for it. I got to build up my music list, my music catalog or library, whatever you want to call it, but the Doobie Brothers don't profit from that. You've taken that model and said, "Hey, we can get you compensated also".

Hilary Mason: Well, and I would say that that is a good analogy, but then you think about, I remember Napster. It was awesome from a customer point of view. Any song you wanted was there and there were recordings of live shows you couldn't get any other way. We have nothing like that today, and also, musicians don't make enough money for their music. I think this is an example of how not to architect an industry around a technical change, and hopefully we can do better this time.

Rich Lumelleau: That's what I'm saying. Seems like you guys have figured out a way to take that great idea and figure out a way to make the creator a beneficiary.

Hilary Mason: We're trying, and I think it is the right way. Whether we figure it out or someone else does, I think we need people out in the market building businesses and trying to create examples of that.

Rich Lumelleau: What's the most surprising thing that you found about building a company around generative storytelling?

Hilary Mason: I would say the most surprising thing is more around what stories matter to our players, in that, I think I spend a bunch of time in the gaming industry, and there's this thread where people are like, generative AI and AI tech lets us have infinite games. We've discovered through our own testing, nobody actually wants that. The things people want are their character, their adventure, and then they want moments that are the same as what everyone else is experiencing, so they've something to talk about. Our players, I should say, they're not usually people who would say, I'm a gamer, but they are people who read, and they're people who watch TV, and they're people for whom media is a big part of their social life. I'm one of these people too. I talk to my friends about books. That's how I find out what I should be reading. For this group of people, at least, having infinite stories that are experienced alone is not that interesting, but having a shared point in time or a shared story or the ability to share it and say, "Hey, how did you meet Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice?" Or I got him to be a vampire. Did you get that? Those are the things that are actually meaningful, and so that was one that it did surprise me because there is a lot of energy going into infinite game worlds, and actually, that isn't what matters. What matters are the moments that are shared between our experiences, because it gives us something to talk about and relate to each other about.

Rich Lumelleau: Sure. Has Hidden Door realized, is it more books or shows or movies that are generating the most interest, the most engagement?

Hilary Mason: For us, it's both. We were really fortunate to do an adaptation of the Crow based on the graphic novel, but it was around the time the movie came out last summer, and that was really popular and remains super popular. We also have a Pride and Prejudice adaptation, which, again, it's a 200-year-old novel, but we all still love it, and it's something that we share culturally. I can't say it's one or the other. I actually think that one of the most interesting places this tech will be influential in entertainment is in breaking down the differences between, say, the publishing industry, the gaming industry, the movie industry, because each of those industries is still architected around what it took to produce the artifacts. Film is financed, careers are built, roles, job titles exist because of what it takes to make a film. Then you have publishing, which is really different than the film industry. Video games, different yet again. TV is a little bit of a mix between film and books, but I think we will see a slow transformation in entertainment broadly, because what this tech is really great at is adapting information in one format to another, in one place to another. It's not creative. It doesn't come up with good stuff. But given somebody's direction and an original world to start with, it can do something interesting. I know you didn't ask me for a big long-term hot take, but I gave you one anyway.

Rich Lumelleau: I've taken.

Hilary Mason: I think, fundamentally, it doesn't matter where the creativity starts, and I think there are a lot of people out there with world-building talent who have not written that book yet or who are building online communities around their worlds, who will be able to find an audience and build that audience because of this tack in this change. I think the future of entertainment looks really different, and that it actually doesn't matter where the idea begins.

Dan Boyd: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. That's all for today. We'll see you tomorrow.

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