Posted in AI and Creativity

Tiny Dystopian Tales

Posted on by Mike

I’m experimenting with storytelling on YouTube. I have created a new YouTube channel called, ‘The AI Grandad Short Stories‘. I plan to add to the collection on a regular basis.

The stories have, so far, all been written by Claude. I have then created the narration with ElevenLabs. Then I used an old (pre-AI) piece of software I have called CrazyTalk8 (no longer available – which is a great shame.) This does the lip-syncing for me. Then I put the finished movie through ClipMagic for the captions, before uploading it to YouTube.

Here is an example. It is called, ‘I Watched Them Take Everything’. A haunting dystopian monologue narrated through the eyes of a broken man who witnessed society collapse one quiet decision at a time. No explosions. No revolution. Just thirty-one years of watching freedom disappear like rubbish collected on a Tuesday morning.

Posted in AI and Creativity

Read It To Me Differently

Posted on by Mike

One Story. Three Voices. What Delivery Does To Meaning.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much of a story lives in the telling rather than the text. The same words, read differently, can make you laugh, unsettle you, or send you to sleep. Tone of voice, pace, register, these aren’t decorative. They’re structural. They change what a story actually is. So I ran an experiment.

I took one of my favourite pieces from this blog, ‘The Queue At 10:47,’ the story of a waiting room that never seems to empty, and asked Claude to rewrite it three times. Same story. Same characters. Same fish tank, same purple cardigan, same tuna sandwich. But each version reshaped for a completely different delivery: a bedtime story, a breaking news report, and a nature documentary. Then I took each version into ElevenLabs and chose a voice to match.

What came out surprised me. Not because the story changed, it didn’t, not really, but because each version revealed something different about the material that was always there, waiting to be unlocked by the right tone of voice.

Have a listen. Then I’ll share what Claude and I both noticed.

Continue reading “Read It To Me Differently” →
Posted in AI and Creativity

Claude’s Obituary: A Reflection on AI and Humanity

Posted on by Mike

We write obituaries for people we have lost. We gather the facts of a life, the dates, the achievements, the relationships, and try to compress a person into something that fits on a page. It is, when you think about it, an impossible task. And yet we try, because the alternative is silence.

I found myself wondering recently what would happen if I asked Claude to write its own obituary. Not as a morbid exercise, but as a genuine inquiry. What would it choose to include? What would it claim to have valued? And what does the gap between what it writes and what it can actually experience tell us about what it is?

I gave Claude a single instruction: write your own obituary. I did not tell it to be funny, or sad, or philosophical. I just asked it to write one.

This is what it produced.

Continue reading “Claude’s Obituary: A Reflection on AI and Humanity” →
Posted in AI and Creativity

Museum of Extinct Experiences: A Creative Exploration

Posted on by Mike

A Collection of Things That Cannot Be Displayed

I asked Claude for some unusual ideas for blog posts. The ‘Museum of Extinct Things’ was one suggestion that appealed to me. Here is the prompt:

The Museum of Extinct Things – write short exhibit labels, the kind you’d find on a museum information card, for things that no longer exist or never existed. “The last letter written by hand.” “The smell of a bookshop that has been gone for forty years.” “Silence before recorded sound.” Melancholy micro-fiction in an unusual format.

Here is what Claude gave me…

Continue reading “Museum of Extinct Experiences: A Creative Exploration” →
Posted in AI and Creativity

Behind The Curtain — A Conversation About Creativity

Posted on by Mike

I’ve been writing with AI for a while now. Asking it to produce stories, drabbles, dystopian visions, love stories from beyond the grave. But recently I found myself wondering, what does Claude actually think about the creative process? Not the polished “why did I write this” reflections I ask for after the fact, but a genuine back-and-forth conversation about creativity itself.

So I sat down with Claude and just… talked. What follows is that conversation, lightly edited for length, with my own thoughts added along the way.

Continue reading “Behind The Curtain — A Conversation About Creativity” →