I’ve always wondered whether AI could truly capture human emotion, not in a grand novel or sweeping script, but in something small and precise. A story distilled to exactly 100-words. As someone who’s recently set up the weekly AI Drabble Challenge, it felt only fair that I should try it myself. Could a machine take a handful of words, a single image, and craft something that feels alive?
Continue reading “I Gave AI Five Words and a Picture – Here’s the Story It Wrote”
I’ve always loved the discipline of writing a Drabble (a 100-word story). A Drabble forces you to choose every word with care, no padding, no shortcuts. Now I’m curious: what happens when we invite AI into the process?
Can AI really help us write better stories, or does it simply hold up a mirror to our imagination?
This post launches a brand new weekly AI writing challenge where we explore that question together.
Continue reading “The AI Drabble Challenge: 100 Words, Infinite Possibilities”
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.
Continue reading “When AI Surprises You: The Joy of Unexpected Results”
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
Continue reading “When Chaos Tells a Story: An AI Creativity Experiment”
For many years, I’ve loved writing flash fiction. One of my favourite forms is the Drabble, a story told in exactly 100 words. The form originated in the 1980s at the Birmingham University SF Society, who adapted a word game from Monty Python’s Big Red Book (1971). That version joked that “Drabble” was a game where the first person to write a novel won. The society found a novel a little ambitious, so they fixed the length to a manageable 100 words, and that rule defines the modern Drabble.
The more I experimented with AI, the more I suspected it could now write a better Drabble than I could, though it still needed my guidance. Let me show you what happened.
Continue reading “Can a Machine Write Better Fiction Than Me? Exploring AI and Creativity”
The AI Grandad 