What happens when you show an AI a picture of a world-weary alien nursing a whisky in a neon-lit bar and ask it to write a monologue? Honestly, I wasn’t sure either. But the result was melancholy, atmospheric, and unexpectedly moving, which tells you something interesting about where creative AI is heading.
Here is the story in audio, created by ElevenLabs. Followed by the text of the story. Enjoy.
Continue reading “AI Writes Melancholic Monologue About Earth”
Every now and again I give an AI a single prompt and let it write a short story. I do not edit the result. I simply choose one worth keeping. Below you will find the exact prompt, the story it produced, and one brief thought that stayed with me after reading. Nothing more.
This week I used Claude.
Continue reading “Dystopian Grief: A Short Story Exploration”
I recently discovered that in the dashboard of my blog WordPress put in suggested writing prompts. I thought it might be fun to put one of these prompts to three of my favourite chatbots, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The prompt was:
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
Continue reading “Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike”
I’m experimenting with storytelling on YouTube. I have created a new YouTube channel called, ‘The AI Grandad Short Stories‘. I plan to add to the collection on a regular basis.
The stories have, so far, all been written by Claude. I have then created the narration with ElevenLabs. Then I used an old (pre-AI) piece of software I have called CrazyTalk8 (no longer available – which is a great shame.) This does the lip-syncing for me. Then I put the finished movie through ClipMagic for the captions, before uploading it to YouTube.
Continue reading “Engaging Dystopian Tales on YouTube”
I’ve been thinking lately about how much of a story lives in the telling rather than the text. The same words, read differently, can make you laugh, unsettle you, or send you to sleep. Tone of voice, pace, register, these aren’t decorative. They’re structural. They change what a story actually is. So I ran an experiment.
I took one of my favourite pieces from this blog, ‘The Queue At 10:47,’ the story of a waiting room that never seems to empty, and asked Claude to rewrite it three times. Same story. Same characters. Same fish tank, same purple cardigan, same tuna sandwich. But each version reshaped for a completely different delivery: a bedtime story, a breaking news report, and a nature documentary. Then I took each version into ElevenLabs and chose a voice to match.
What came out surprised me. Not because the story changed, it didn’t, not really, but because each version revealed something different about the material that was always there, waiting to be unlocked by the right tone of voice.
Have a listen. Then I’ll share what Claude and I both noticed.
Continue reading “Read It To Me Differently”
The AI Grandad 