I recently discovered that in the dashboard of my blog WordPress put in suggested writing prompts. I thought it might be fun to put one of these prompts to three of my favourite chatbots, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The prompt was:
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
Continue reading “Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike”
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.
Continue reading “Engaging Dystopian Tales on YouTube”
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”
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”
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”
The AI Grandad 