I’ve decided to make today’s post a little challenge. Below are five 100-word stories, Drabbles. Three were written by AI, and two were written by me before I ever discovered AI. They are from my book, ‘Tiny Stories’.
Back then, I thought every twist, pause and line break came from my own head. Now, I’m not so sure where “my” voice ends and “its” begins, which makes this experiment all the more fun.
Continue reading “Can You Tell Who Wrote These Drabbles – Me or the Machine?”
If you’re puzzled by AI for more than ten seconds, ask it why, not how.
When I first started experimenting with AI, I treated it like a tricky gadget I couldn’t quite figure out. I’d type a prompt, get an odd or unhelpful reply, and then immediately start searching online for “how to fix it.” Half the time I’d end up buried in articles about neural networks, transformer models and training data, interesting, yes, but about as helpful as reading a car’s engineering manual when all you want to do is drive.
Over time, I realised something simple: AI doesn’t reward those who understand every detail of how it works, it rewards those who stay curious. Every mistake, every odd answer, every unexpected twist in a conversation is an opportunity to ask why rather than how.
That’s how the 10-Second Curiosity Rule began. It came from one of those slightly exasperating moments when ChatGPT gave me an answer that made no sense at all. My first instinct was to sigh and close the laptop. But I stopped myself, took a breath, counted to ten, and asked, “Why did you say that?”
Continue reading “The 10-Second Curiosity Rule”
People say curiosity killed the cat, but I think it made the cat smarter.
Every time I open a new AI tool, I’m reminded that curiosity isn’t something we grow out of, it’s something we grow back into. It keeps us young, alert, and adaptable in a world that refuses to stand still. The moment we stop asking questions is the moment we stop learning. Curiosity isn’t about knowing everything; it’s about wanting to understand, to try and make sense of.
When I first started playing with AI, I didn’t have a grand plan. I just wanted to see what it could do. One question became ten, ten became a hundred, and before I knew it, I’d fallen down the most fascinating rabbit hole of my life.
Continue reading “When Did Curiosity Become a Superpower?”
For this week’s AI Drabble Challenge, I decided to test how three very different AI systems, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, would each handle the same creative task.
Take a Shakespearean insult, “The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes” , and an accompanying image, (the one above) and turn them into a 100-word sinister monologue.
The prompt I gave them was simple:
“I want you to use this quote ‘The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes’ and this image to write a 100-word sinister monologue. Include the quote in the story.”
Continue reading “The AI Drabble Challenge: When Three AIs Meet Shakespeare”
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”
The AI Grandad 