Tag: AI

A human hand and a robotic hand both writing in a notebook, words floating into the air,
Posted in AI and Creativity

Does the Average Reader Care If a Story Is Written by AI?

Posted on by Mike

I’ve been wondering about this lately. As someone who experiments with AI to write everything from short stories to blog posts, I often ask myself: does it really matter to the reader who wrote the words, me or the machine? I have a lot of writer friends who say that it does.

But the more I explore, the more personal it feels. I’ve watched people read my AI-written stories with genuine emotion, only for that expression to shift when I reveal the author wasn’t entirely human. It’s in that moment, between curiosity and unease, that I realise we’re in new storytelling territory.

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A face rising out of a steaming coffee mug
Posted in AI and Creativity

The Last Cup: When AI Writes About Burnout Better Than We Do

Posted on by Mike

Every now and again, I like to let AI take the pen, or in this case, the keyboard. The Last Cup is one of those experiments: a short story written entirely by AI with no edits from me. What fascinates me is how it captures something so human, exhaustion, ambition, and that quiet realisation that work might be drinking us dry. It made me wonder: when AI writes about burnout, is it simply echoing us, or holding up a mirror we’d rather not face?

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Surreal illustration of a man with a miniature city growing from his head, symbolising urban overthinking and creative sprawl.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When AI Edits Itself: A Story, a Self-Critique, and a Lesson in Machine Creativity

Posted on by Mike

This week, I decided to hand the red pen to the machine. I asked AI not only to write a story but also to critique and rewrite it using its own feedback. Think of it as a creative writing class where the child and the teacher are the same machine, equal parts fascinating and faintly unsettling.

As someone who’s spent a lifetime teaching others to think critically, I wanted to see what happens when the critic and the creator merge. Could an AI recognise emotion, clichés, and rhythm in its own writing, or would it just reshuffle words?

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A robot and an old man standing close to each other and staring into teacher others eyes.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When AI Surprises You: The Joy of Unexpected Results

Posted on by Mike

I’ve started to realise that the most interesting moments with AI aren’t the ones that go exactly to plan. They’re the ones that don’t.

You type in what you think is a precise prompt, expecting a predictable outcome and the machine goes completely off script. Sometimes it misses the point spectacularly. Other times, it creates something that feels oddly beautiful.

That’s partly because Large Language Models (LLM’s) like ChatGPT don’t actually understand what they write, they predict the next most likely word or image based on patterns they’ve learned from billions of examples. Every so often, those predictions take a creative detour, and that’s when things get interesting.

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Fusion of human and AI brains surrounded by random images and words, illustrating collaboration between human imagination and machine logic.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When Chaos Tells a Story: An AI Creativity Experiment

Posted on by Mike

For this experiment, I decided to hand the steering wheel to chance. I gave ChatGPT two random, unrelated images (both created by Midjourney) and five random words, words with no connection, rhyme or reason (words created by ChatGPT). Then I asked it to write a 200-word story that somehow pulled everything together. No hints. No context. Just chaos.

It’s the kind of challenge I’d struggle with myself. A jumble of words and pictures that don’t belong together, and yet, that’s what makes it irresistible. Could an AI find a thread of meaning where there shouldn’t be one?

The five random, unrelated words were: Velvet, Splinter, Compass, Jigsaw, Marshmallow

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