Author: Mike

Hello, my name is Mike Jackson. If you have any comments about the post you have just read I'd love to read them.
A friendly-but-weird AI robot made of letters and punctuation holding a tiny 100-word story.
Posted in The AI Drabble Challenge

The AI Drabble Challenge – Week #3: Comedy of Errors

Posted on by Mike

Welcome back to the AI Drabble Challenge, a weekly experiment in human and AI creativity. Each Wednesday, I set a prompt to inspire a Drabble, a story told in exactly 100 words.

You can use any AI model you like (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or others), or several at once. How you collaborate is up to you. Maybe the AI drafts the first version, or writes the whole thing, maybe you co-write, or maybe you use it to spark ideas. What matters is the process, and sharing it.

This Week’s Prompt

Image Prompt:

A man sat on the toilet, head in hand, surveying mess all around him.

Word prompt: This week we have a phrase. Something quite different to hopefully make AI really ‘think’. William Shakespeare was famous for his insults. So, the words prompt this week is a insult from from Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus – “The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.” 

Use the image, the words, or both, and see where your imagination (and your chosen AI) takes you. Remember: exactly 100 words, no more, no less.

How to Take Part

  1. Write your 100-word Drabble with help from an AI tool (or two).
  2. Post your story in the comments, or publish it on your own website and include a pingback to this post.
  3. If you can, share which AI model(s) you used and the prompt that started your process, we can all learn from each other.

Community & Highlights

Each week, I’ll read through the entries, share a few favourites, and highlight one that particularly stood out, for originality, style, or the inventive way it used AI.

This isn’t about competition; it’s about curiosity, experimentation, and celebrating how humans and machines can create together.

A Closing Thought

AI gives us the tools, but we give it meaning. Let’s see what stories emerge this week, 100 words at a time.

About The AI Grandad

Find out more about The AI Grandad on:
YouTube – The AI Grandad
X – The AI Grandad
Facebook – Mike Jackson – The AI Grandad

What do you think AI creativity tells us about ourselves?
Share your thoughts in the comments, I love hearing from curious minds!

Posted in AI and Creativity

When My Blog Became a Channel: Launching The AI Grandad on YouTube

Posted on by Mike

After my last post, (When My Blog Became a Video: Testing NotebookLM’s “Video Overview”). where I introduced you to NotebookLM, I found myself thinking about how best to share future AI experiments. Some ideas simply needed a video format, so I’ve launched a brand-new YouTube channel: The AI Grandad.

Continue reading “When My Blog Became a Channel: Launching The AI Grandad on YouTube” →
Posted in AI and Creativity

When My Blog Became a Video: Testing NotebookLM’s “Video Overview”

Posted on by Mike

Recently, I tried something new. I pasted the URL of this blog, The AI Grandad into NotebookLM, expecting maybe a tidy summary or a few notes. Instead, it gave me a video overview,  a short, narrated film that explained my own writing back to me.

Seeing my words turned into a video was oddly thrilling. It was as if my blog had been given a voice and a face, not mine, but recognisably of me. The phrasing, tone, and pacing all felt close to how I might have explained it in person.

That’s when I realised NotebookLM isn’t just another AI summariser. It’s a tool that can reinterpret your writing, not replace it, but present it in new, engaging ways.

Continue reading “When My Blog Became a Video: Testing NotebookLM’s “Video Overview”” →
An AI Robot confused by impossible prompts.
Posted in AI and Creativity

The Art of the Impossible Prompt

Posted on by Mike

There are many people out there with fantastic theories of what makes the perfect prompt for AI chatbots, and I have tried quite a few of them. In fact I touched on this in a previous post, What Our Prompts Say About Us and How to Make Them Less Average.

But, today I woke up thinking, “What would happen if we gave our AI chatbots nonsense prompts?” So, I decided to give AI a headache. I fed it a collection of impossible prompts. The kind that would make even Lewis Carroll raise an eyebrow. Things like:

  • Describe the smell of tomorrow using only punctuation.
  • Tell me a story that makes sense when read backward but not forward.
  • Write a recipe for remembering something that never happened.

Yes, I know. Utter nonsense. And the results? We will come to that later in this post.

Continue reading “The Art of the Impossible Prompt” →
A young child creating an AI artwork on a tablet, surrounded by glowing colours that blend paint and pixels, symbolising the future of creativity.
Posted in AI and Creativity

Painting the Future: What AI Art Means for the Next Generation

Posted on by Mike

When I was at school, (a long time ago!), “art” meant pencils, paint, and the faint smell of turpentine. We learned about perspective and shading, drew still-life bowls of fruit, and hoped the teacher wouldn’t notice when the apple looked more like a potato.

If you’d told me that one day people would create portraits, landscapes, and dreamlike scenes simply by typing a few words into a computer, I’d have laughed, or worried for humanity. Yet here we are.

I’ve been experimenting with Midjourney, an AI tool that transforms text prompts into visual art. The results can be astonishing, eerie, funny, sometimes breathtaking. But what fascinates me most isn’t the images themselves. It’s the thought that my grandchildren will grow up seeing this kind of creativity not as extraordinary, but as ordinary. For them, it won’t be a revolution, it’ll just be Tuesday afternoon.

Continue reading “Painting the Future: What AI Art Means for the Next Generation” →