Tag: artificial-intelligence

A friendly-but-weird AI robot made of letters and punctuation holding a tiny 100-word story.
Posted in The AI Drabble Challenge

The AI Drabble Challenge – Image Prompting

Posted on by Mike

Welcome to This Week’s AI Drabble Challenge

Welcome back to our weekly playground for curious humans and equally curious machines. Every Friday I share a new prompt, and together we explore what happens when we let AI join in the storytelling.

A Drabble is simply a story told in 100 words exactly, short enough to be playful, long enough to surprise us. You’re welcome to use any AI tool you like: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, NotebookLM… whatever you’re comfortable with. How you collaborate is up to you. Maybe the AI drafts the first version, or writes the whole thing, maybe you co-write, or maybe you use it to spark ideas. What matters is the process, and sharing it.

There’s no pressure, no “right way,” and definitely no grading. The goal is curiosity, collaboration, and seeing what strange or wonderful things the machines produce when we give them a nudge.

Continue reading “The AI Drabble Challenge – Image Prompting” →
A friendly-but-weird AI robot made of letters and punctuation holding a tiny 100-word story.
Posted in The AI Drabble Challenge

The AI Drabble Challenge – Constrained Prompting

Posted on by Mike

Welcome to This Week’s AI Drabble Challenge

Welcome back to our weekly playground for curious humans and equally curious machines. Every Friday I share a new prompt, and together we explore what happens when we let AI join in the storytelling.

A Drabble is simply a story told in 100 words exactly, short enough to be playful, long enough to surprise us. You’re welcome to use any AI tool you like: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, NotebookLM… whatever you’re comfortable with. How you collaborate is up to you. Maybe the AI drafts the first version, or writes the whole thing, maybe you co-write, or maybe you use it to spark ideas. What matters is the process, and sharing it.

Continue reading “The AI Drabble Challenge – Constrained Prompting” →

Thinking Out Loud

The Taste Question 

“Taste is supposed to be the thing humans bring. We know what we like. We know what feels true. Except… does taste survive when the machine is doing all the heavy lifting? Or does taste become something more like preference, which is a much smaller thing? I could prefer the version where the protagonist is angry over the version where she’s sad. But that’s not taste. That’s whim. Taste is built on knowledge, on pattern recognition across hundreds of books, on instinct honed through years of reading. If the machine has absorbed all that too, then what am I tasting with? My own limitations?”

Mike

A dystopian-style official newsletter titled “Compliance Connect” laid out like a corporate bulletin, featuring sections on reassignment, practical living tips, wellbeing forms, and edited resident letters, with calm, reassuring language that contrasts with unsettling instructions, suggesting a controlled and bureaucratic society.
Posted in AI Experiments

Weird Prompting

Posted on by Mike

I am currently reading an interesting book called ‘How To Talk To AI (And How Not To) by Jamie Bartlett. In an early chapter about creativity he writes:

“The creative act might now include coming up with weird and wonderful prompts, frames and constraints which generate interesting ideas created between you and the machine.”

This got me thinking. I wondered what sort of ‘weird’ prompt Claude might give me for a 300 word grim, sinister dystopian story. It gave me this…

Continue reading “Weird Prompting” →

Thinking Out Loud

The Vanishing Act 

“What if the machine is actually better at both writing and editing than I am? Not by accident, but genuinely. Better prose. Better structure. Better at catching what doesn’t work. I want to sit with that uncomfortable thought for a moment instead of rushing past it. If that’s true, then what am I doing here? I’m not the writer. I’m not the editor. So what role am I actually playing? Maybe the answer is that I’m becoming something we haven’t quite named yet. A curator of possibility, sure, but that feels too grand for what might actually be happening. Maybe I’m just the one who says yes or no. And maybe that’s enough.”

Mike