Tag: AI

A frail dying old man, emaciated face with sunken cheeks and deep wrinkles. Wearing a heavy, rusty cyberpunk neuro-helmet over his head with glowing red interface lights.
Posted in stories

Lost Memories: A Tale of Memory Extraction at Seventy-Three

Posted on by Mike

They told me it would be painless. They always tell you it will be painless.

I was seventy-three when they fitted the first interface. A volunteer, they called me. Pioneer. That word tasted sweet once. Now it sits in my throat like old copper wire. They needed someone whose mind had already softened at the edges, they said. Someone whose memories had grown loose, easy to pull free like teeth from rotting gum. The young ones held too tight. Their thoughts fought back. Mine, they said, would cooperate.

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Rain-soaked Manchester street on Deansgate at dusk, with a thoughtful middle-aged woman in a dark coat standing in the foreground. A pigeon stands in a puddle near her feet while a red bus approaches in the background. Shopfront lights and wet pavement reflections create a sombre, reflective mood suggesting quiet grief and urban isolation.
Posted in stories

Dystopian Grief: A Short Story Exploration

Posted on by Mike

Every now and again I give an AI a single prompt and let it write a short story. I do not edit the result. I simply choose one worth keeping. Below you will find the exact prompt, the story it produced, and one brief thought that stayed with me after reading. Nothing more.

This week I used Claude.

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Whimsical cartoon illustration of a flustered AI robot surrounded by chaotic tasks, including scattered paperwork, a globe covered in notes, a sock drawer labelled “Gravity”, a “Global Domination – Oops!” control panel, a sprinkler spraying water, and an open sourdough recipe book, suggesting humorous incompetence rather than world domination.
Posted in AI and Creativity

Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike

Posted on by Mike

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.

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Posted in stories

Engaging Dystopian Tales on YouTube

Posted on by Mike

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.

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Posted in AI Experiments

Read It To Me Differently

Posted on by Mike

One Story. Three Voices. What Delivery Does To Meaning.

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” →