Tag: AI

A man sat on the toilet, head in hand, surveying mess all around him.
Posted in The AI Drabble Challenge

The AI Drabble Challenge: When Three AIs Meet Shakespeare

Posted on by Mike

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.

The Challenge

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” →
Posted in AI and Creativity

When My Blog Became a Channel: Launching The AI Grandad on YouTube

Posted on by Mike

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” →
Posted in AI and Creativity

When My Blog Became a Video: Testing NotebookLM’s “Video Overview”

Posted on by Mike

Recently, I tried something new. I pasted the URL of this blog, The AI Grandad into NotebookLM, expecting maybe a tidy summary or a few notes. Instead, it gave me a video overview,  a short, narrated film that explained my own writing back to me.

Seeing my words turned into a video was oddly thrilling. It was as if my blog had been given a voice and a face, not mine, but recognisably of me. The phrasing, tone, and pacing all felt close to how I might have explained it in person.

That’s when I realised NotebookLM isn’t just another AI summariser. It’s a tool that can reinterpret your writing, not replace it, but present it in new, engaging ways.

Continue reading “When My Blog Became a Video: Testing NotebookLM’s “Video Overview”” →
An AI Robot confused by impossible prompts.
Posted in AI and Creativity

The Art of the Impossible Prompt

Posted on by Mike

There are many people out there with fantastic theories of what makes the perfect prompt for AI chatbots, and I have tried quite a few of them. In fact I touched on this in a previous post, What Our Prompts Say About Us and How to Make Them Less Average.

But, today I woke up thinking, “What would happen if we gave our AI chatbots nonsense prompts?” So, I decided to give AI a headache. I fed it a collection of impossible prompts. The kind that would make even Lewis Carroll raise an eyebrow. Things like:

  • Describe the smell of tomorrow using only punctuation.
  • Tell me a story that makes sense when read backward but not forward.
  • Write a recipe for remembering something that never happened.

Yes, I know. Utter nonsense. And the results? We will come to that later in this post.

Continue reading “The Art of the Impossible Prompt” →
An AI Robot conducting an orchestra.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When AI Does the Heavy Lifting, What’s Left for the Writer?

Posted on by Mike

Every so often, I find myself watching the cursor blink, and the strangest thing happens. I type a prompt. The AI thinks for a moment. Then, as if conjured from nowhere, a fully formed short story appears on the screen. Sometimes, it even goes back and improves itself. It analyses tone, tightens the structure, sharpens the language.

And I sit there, cup of tea cooling beside me, wondering… where do I fit in now?

It’s a quiet sort of unease. When I first started writing, it was all mine, the hours spent choosing words, the quiet satisfaction of crafting a line that finally worked. The blank page was both enemy and companion. Now, the machine fills it in seconds.

So what does that make me? Redundant? Or something else entirely?

Continue reading “When AI Does the Heavy Lifting, What’s Left for the Writer?” →