From a spooky idea to the live channel
Trick or Treating After Dark is made with AI tools. This page explains plainly what is automated, what is checked by a person, and which parts are made up.
In short
- The hourly ghost stories are fiction. The towns, people and spirits in them are invented for the show, and they go on the live channel automatically.
- The nightly episodes are about real places. They are researched on the web, and every page used is linked on the episode page.
- The scripts are written by an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic).
- The voices are synthetic, made with Kokoro text-to-speech. No real person reads the lines.
- The hosts are original animated characters created for the show. They are not real people, and the ghosts are not real ghosts.
- A human producer reviews and approves every nightly episode before it airs.
- Pictures: scenes for the stories may be AI-generated illustrations. Photos of real places in the nightly episodes come from the pages they were found on, and are credited on screen and on the episode page.
How an episode is made
- A story is dreamed up. Every hour, an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) writes a new spooky-fun ghost story for all ages, told by the hosts.
- Or a real place is researched. For the nightly episode, the model picks one real haunted place, reads about its history and legends on the web, and writes a longer conversation about it. History is told as history, and legends are told as legends.
- The hosts are voiced. The lines are read by Kokoro, an open-weight text-to-speech model, with one synthetic voice per host.
- The video is rendered. The animated studio, the hosts, captions, pictures and credits are put together into a finished video.
- A person approves the nightly episode. The producer watches it, can correct the script and render it again, and only then schedules it. The short hourly stories go on the live channel without that step.
- It goes on air. New stories play on the live channel at trickortreating.afterdark.fm, and nightly episodes stay in the archive with links to their sources.
Read the originals
A spoken episode can simplify history or get a date wrong, even after review. Every nightly episode page lists the pages it was researched from under Sources. When something matters to you, such as dates, names or whether a place can be visited, check the original page.
The hosts
Morty, Hazel, Bones and Pip are original characters made for this show. They are fictional: they are not real people. Their voices are synthetic and their studio is animated.
Report a mistake
Spotted something wrong in an episode? Contact us with the episode link (it starts with https://trickortreating.afterdark.fm/e/) and what needs fixing. Corrections are reviewed by the producer, and a wrong episode is fixed or taken down.
Credits
- Research and photos: linked on each episode page. They belong to their authors and owners.
- Scripts: Claude by Anthropic.
- Voices: Kokoro-82M text-to-speech (Apache 2.0).
- Hosts and studio: original characters and animation made for Trick or Treating After Dark.
- Site art: the background art and textures are original, drawn for this site.