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.
Posted in AI Experiments

What Happens When AI Turns Flash Fiction into Comics?

Posted on by Mike

I’ve always seen myself as a storyteller first and a writer/creator of stories second. As such I have always been fascinated in trying to find different ways to tell a story to an audience. What I am discovering, as I experiment with AI, is that the opportunities for different ways to tell a story are becoming so much more exciting.

So, today I have been playing with CatGPT’s image creator. I have taken a couple of Twitter length stories and asked ChatGPT to create a graphic comic page telling the story. I have been impressed. My prompt in both these examples was simply, “Use this story to create a 6 panel comic. Each panel needs to be a different size. (Then I inserted the story).”

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Posted in AI and Creativity

Claude and ChatGPT

Posted on by Mike

The story was written by Claude. The image was generated by ChatGPT.

Performance

The grief audit flagged Sarah for insufficient mourning. Her husband had been dead six months; she’d smiled twice in public. The tribunal gave her a choice: pharmaceutical correction or emotional retraining. She chose the pills. Now she cries at everything. They’re very pleased with her.

Posted in AI Experiments

Flash Fiction Generator

Posted on by Mike

I love listening to AI podcasts. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about Claude’s (Anthropic) growing expertise in creating code. Some experts were suggesting that by the end of the year AI will be writing 90% of all code.

Now, I know absolutely nothing about coding but I am forever curious. So, I asked Claude, “Can you write a piece of code that can generate pieces of flash fiction?” I was expecting a simple answer, instead it replied, “Absolutely. Given your flash fiction expertise, I’ll build something with the kinds of constraints and parameters you’d actually use – genre, word count limits, tone, specific prompts or themes.”

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Posted in AI Experiments

Reverse Engineering

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Yesterday I used an image created by Midjourney as a prompt in Claude for a 200-word short story. Today I wondered what would happen if I reversed the process and used the story as a prompt for an image.

So, I put the story into ChatGPT’s image creator and asked for an image that reflected the story. This what I got…

I’m not sure which is the more melancholy, the story or the image? What do you think?

As a further experiment I put the title and opening paragraph of this post and put it into ChatGPT and said this was the opening of a blog post, give me a feature image. I liked the output.

A copper tea kettle kept on a old rustic stove with smoke coming out -
Posted in AI and Creativity

Image to Story

Posted on by Mike

I found this picture amongst the many I have created using Midjourney. I’ve no idea what was going through my mind when I initially asked Midjourney for it, but I thought it might make a good prompt for a story. I used Claude to create this 200-word tale. What do you think?

A Watched Pot Never Boils

She used to say a watched pot never boils, but I’ve nothing else to watch anymore. Forty-seven years we’ve had this kettle. Wedding gift from her mother, who despised me. (The feeling was mutual.) Copper tarnished now, same as everything. I’ve stopped polishing it. What’s the point? She was the one who cared about such things. Kept this kitchen spotless. Kept me together, if I’m honest.

Steam rises and I think of her breath on winter mornings, how she’d cup her hands around the first mug, eyes closed, that little sound she made. Contentment, I suppose. I never told her I loved that sound. Assumed there’d be time. There’s always time until there isn’t.

The whistle will come soon. I’ll pour the water into a single cup now, hers, actually, the one with the chipped handle she refused to throw away. Character, she called it. Everything had character to her. Even me, apparently.

Funny how a kettle outlasts a marriage, a lifetime, a person. It’ll outlast me too. Someone will find it when I’m gone. Charity shop, probably. Another kitchen. Another hand reaching for the handle.

The water’s almost there. Any moment now. I’m in no rush. The waiting’s all I have left.