Two Images, Two Captions, Two Stories

In our first ‘Give This AI Image a Caption’, one of our readers, Valerie, responded with the caption for this image, ‘The Internet is Down’.

The following week’s ‘Give This AI Image a Caption’ post contained this image and Kieran gave us the caption, ‘He Played For an Audience Long Gone’.

So, I decided to use both images and captions as prompts for ChatGPT. In both cases I asked for a 200-word story. Here are those stories:

The Internet Is Down

The internet is down. That sentence should mean inconvenience. Mild panic. A modem reboot and a few dramatic sighs. But listen closely and you’ll hear what it really means: the locks have clicked open.

They arrived the moment the last bar of signal died, drifting out of corners and cracks in the wallpaper like damp coming to claim a room. They were always here, of course. The internet just kept them distracted, kept them fed. Endless little crumbs of attention, outrage, envy, desire. Enough to stop them looking at me.

Now they look. The red one’s mouth is a wound that never closes. The blue one smiles like it’s practising. The black one trembles with eagerness. They’re not monsters, not exactly. They’re habits. They’re urges. They’re the parts of me the internet used to manage on my behalf.

I can feel them circling, waiting for the old reflex: reach for a screen, reach for reassurance, reach for someone else’s voice. But there’s no feed. No scroll. No comforting chorus of strangers telling me what to think and who to be. So they lean in closer, hungry and thrilled, whispering, Go on. Entertain us.

And I understand, with a cold little clarity, why they’re smiling. Without the internet, there’s nothing between us. No Wi-Fi, no filter, no mercy

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He Played For an Audience Long Gone

He played for an audience long gone. The violin was already awake when he lifted it. The strings hummed softly, as if warming themselves, as if they had been expecting him. He did not remember learning this tune, only that stopping midway felt dangerous, like leaving a sentence unfinished.

The room had changed since last time. The walls leaned closer. The doorway behind him was darker, deeper, as though it now led somewhere else entirely. Dust drifted in slow, deliberate spirals, settling only when the bow moved again. Each note pulled something loose. A chair scraped where no chair stood. A breath answered his, out of time. The building did not echo so much as repeat, correcting him when he faltered, urging him on. He sensed them then. Not faces. Never faces. Just weight. Attention. The pressure of being watched by things that remembered him better than he remembered himself.

His fingers ached, but the violin would not allow him to stop. The melody thickened, soured, dragging old moments to the surface. A promise made. A door closed. A name spoken too late. When the final note came, it did not fade. It hung there, trembling, waiting for something else to happen. He stayed very still, waiting for his unseen audience to applaud.

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A Call To Thought

First of all many thanks to Valerie and Kieran for responding to the call to give these images a caption. This is going to be a regular Sunday post and I’m hoping more people will join in.

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