Tag: artificial-intelligence

mage of a bleak, dystopian room with a worn table holding three steaming bowls of food in the foreground. A young woman in dirty, faded clothing sleeps slumped in a plain chair, her head tilted to one side. Behind her, three armed figures in dark tactical gear stand in the doorway, watching silently. Through the grimy windows, a grey industrial city stretches into the distance, reinforcing the cold, controlled atmosphere.
Posted in AI Experiments

Too Hot, Too Cold, Too Wrong

Posted on by Mike

Introduction

After chatting with Claude we decided it would be fun to take a traditional fairy tale and drop it into a dystopian scene. This is Claude’s thinking about why it chose Goldilocks.

Fairy tales are the oldest story machines we have. They run on deep logic, the rule of three, the outsider who stumbles into the wrong place, the test that reveals character. What happens when you drop that ancient structure into a dystopian future and ask AI to drive?

I chose Goldilocks. A girl who breaks into a house, samples what she finds, and falls asleep in someone else’s bed. In the original, it ends with a fright and a lesson. In this version, the bears are the state. And the porridge is compliance.

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Thinking Out Loud

Curation as Creation

“Here’s what we don’t talk about enough: curation is a creative act. Every museum curator, every anthology editor, every person who says ‘this matters and that doesn’t’ is making a generative choice. When I work with an AI, I’m curating possibility. The machine offers, I select. I arrange. I decide what the reader sees and in what order and at what rhythm. That’s not passive consumption. That’s authorship of a different kind, and it’s legitimate. The editor’s eye, the editor’s judgment, the editor’s taste: these are not afterthoughts. They’re the thing itself.”

Mike

A detailed pen and ink illustration in blue-black tones depicting a rural crossroads. A single weathered wooden signpost stands at the fork, carrying two arrow-shaped signs: Salvation pointing left and Damnation pointing right. Overgrown grass fills the verges, trees line the horizon, and the two dirt tracks curve away into the distance in opposite directions.
Posted in stories

An AI Image to An AI Story

Posted on by Mike

For today’s story I gave Claude the image (created by Midjourney) and asked it to suggest various prompts. I like this one –

Horror Monologue / Gothic AI Grandad blog register — inanimate narrator, quiet dread.
The signpost itself narrates. It has stood at this crossroads for 200 years. It has watched every single person choose Damnation. Not one ,not one, has ever taken the left fork. It stopped believing in the other sign long ago. But it cannot take it down.

We then spent some time to and fro refining the story until I was happy with the finished piece. (Is that curation on my part?)

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Landscape image of a bleak, dystopian industrial factory at night, where rows of exhausted workers in worn uniforms operate machinery under harsh lights. A lone armed guard stands in the centre, watching over them. Above the scene, a large glowing red sign reads “OBEY. WORK. SERVE.” while smoke, steel structures, and dim towers recede into the background, creating a cold, oppressive atmosphere.
Posted in AI Experiments

One Syllable at a Time

Posted on by Mike

Introduction

I asked Claude for an idea for an AI experiment and it suggested writing a Drabble (100-word story) with a simple but brutal constraint. The prompt it gave itself was:
“Write a 100-word dystopian drabble set in a government factory, using only monosyllabic words. No two-syllable words. None at all.”

Here is Claude’s ‘thinking’ behind this idea:

It sounds like a neat trick, but it turns out to be more than that. Short words hit hard. They strip out any chance to be poetic or evasive. You can not hide behind long words when all you have is “bleed” and “led out” and “cold.” The constraint forced a kind of blunt, bruised voice that felt right for the subject. Whether it works is for you to judge.

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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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