Category: AI Experiments

A blurred reflection of an older man’s silhouette in a studio window, with a microphone visible, suggesting voice recording and quiet unease.
Posted in AI Experiments

Writing, Emotion Tags, and a Voice That Sounds Like Me

Posted on by Mike

This post is part of an ongoing habit of trying small, contained experiments rather than grand declarations about what AI can or cannot do. In this case, the experiment was simple: could a short piece of writing be performed by an AI voice in a way that felt deliberate rather than mechanical.

I prompted ChatGPT to write a brief dystopian monologue and asked it to include emotional cues directly in the script. I then copied and pasted the text into ElevenLabs and generated the audio using a cloned version of my own voice. No editing, no post-production, no technical tinkering. Just text, instructions, and a voice.

What interested me wasn’t realism or polish, but interpretation.

The Audio – ‘Where Silence Is Suspicious’

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A digital clock face showing" 10:17." The background is dark and mysterious
Posted in AI Experiments

How an Unusual Prompt Changed the Story Completely

Posted on by Mike

When people talk about AI writing, they often focus on what they ask it to do. Write a horror story. Write a cosy mystery. Write something in the style of a particular author. All perfectly reasonable requests.

But in my own experiments, I’ve found that the real shift happens when I stop giving AI sensible instructions and start giving it slightly awkward ones instead. Not genre. Not tone. A rule. A constraint that feels just a little unnatural. That’s when the writing stops drifting and starts making decisions.

This post is about one of those experiments.

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A group of adults in a cosy room debating over sheets of paper, looking puzzled.
Posted in AI Experiments

The Drabble Experiment: When My Writers’ Group Couldn’t Tell Who Wrote What

Posted on by Mike

Last week I toddled off to my writers’ group with a small bundle of Drabbles tucked in my bag, four tiny stories, each exactly 100 words. One of them I wrote seven or eight years ago. The other three? Written that morning by AI, using my original Drabble as an example.

I didn’t tell them which was which. I just read them out and waited to see if anyone could recognise the story written by me. They couldn’t. Not a single one of them. And yet… most of them still don’t believe AI can “really write”. Which, frankly, made the whole thing even more delicious.

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Posted in AI Experiments

Transforming Still Images into Dynamic Videos

Posted on by Mike

How two AI tools turned still pictures into moving art, and why this is just the beginning

This week I tried a small experiment that turned into something surprisingly delightful. I took six still images created in Midjourney and asked it to turn each one into a five-second video. Nothing fancy, no complicated prompting, just a simple “animate this” test to see what it could do.

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