I Gave AI Five Words and a Picture – Here’s the Story It Wrote

I’ve always wondered whether AI could truly capture human emotion, not in a grand novel or sweeping script, but in something small and precise. A story distilled to exactly 100-words. As someone who’s recently set up the weekly AI Drabble Challenge, it felt only fair that I should try it myself. Could a machine take a handful of words, a single image, and craft something that feels alive?

The Prompt

The prompt was an image (see the one above) and five random words – whisper · frost · memory · tether · silence. You could use any combination to get AI to create a 100-word story (a Drabble). How you used AI was entirely up to you.

I decided to use the image and all five words.

This Is My 100-Word Story

The Last Tether

Winter’s frost had stripped the trees bare, leaving only skeletal branches against the grey sky. She released the red balloon, watching it drift upward through the silence.

“Goodbye,” she whispered.

It had been his favourite colour. Every year on this exact day, she returned to this spot, their spot, where they’d carved their initials into the bark now weathered by time. The balloon rose higher, a crimson memory floating free, the string slipping through her fingers like the years themselves.

Some losses never heal. But perhaps they weren’t meant to. Perhaps grief was simply love’s tether to those we’ve lost.

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How I Used AI

I put the image and the five words into Claude with the prompt:

“Use this image and these words to create a 100-word story, whisper · frost · memory · tether · silence”

For this experiment I purposely kept the prompt very simple and left Claude to do all the work! It gave me a 97-word story, so I had to add three of my own. But, apart from that, I did no other editing at all. This is all Claude’s work.

Closing Thoughts

What fascinated me most about this experiment wasn’t the story itself, but the feeling it evoked. Claude didn’t just list the words, it understood their emotional weight. That made me wonder: when an AI writes about loss, whose emotions is it really drawing from, mine, yours, or the vast memory of human stories it’s learned from?

If you’ve tried the AI Drabble Challenge, I’d love to see what your chosen AI produced. Did it surprise you, or did it sound too mechanical? Drop a comment below or tag me on X, let’s compare notes.

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