Tag: Creativity

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” →

Thinking Out Loud

The Wondering

The machine doesn’t wonder. That’s the thing nobody talks about when they’re busy arguing about whether AI is going to replace us all. It generates. It predicts. It produces fluently and endlessly and without the slightest sign of fatigue.

But it doesn’t lie awake at two in the morning turning a question over and over because it hasn’t found the right answer yet. It doesn’t feel the pull of an idea that keeps returning because it hasn’t been fully understood. It doesn’t sit with something unresolved because the resolution matters.

But I do. And so do you. That wondering, that sustained, sometimes uncomfortable, often inconvenient curiosity about things that don’t have easy answers, that’s not a weakness or an inefficiency. It’s the most human thing we do.

It’s where real creative work comes from. And no matter how fluent the machine gets, that wondering remains stubbornly, irreducibly ours.

Mike

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” →
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” →
An elderly man stands in a dimly lit kitchen, facing an open refrigerator, appearing uncertain and still. Around him are scattered notes, a remote control, glasses, and paperwork, suggesting memory loss and confusion. A television in the background shows subtitles, while personal items like a licence plate and notebook hint at fragments of memory that remain.
Posted in stories

What Was I Saying?

Posted on by Mike

One Prompt, One story, One Thought

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.

Continue reading “What Was I Saying?” →