Tag: Technology

Surreal illustration of a man with a miniature city growing from his head, symbolising urban overthinking and creative sprawl.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When AI Edits Itself: A Story, a Self-Critique, and a Lesson in Machine Creativity

Posted on by Mike

This week, I decided to hand the red pen to the machine. I asked AI not only to write a story but also to critique and rewrite it using its own feedback. Think of it as a creative writing class where the child and the teacher are the same machine, equal parts fascinating and faintly unsettling.

As someone who’s spent a lifetime teaching others to think critically, I wanted to see what happens when the critic and the creator merge. Could an AI recognise emotion, clichés, and rhythm in its own writing, or would it just reshuffle words?

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A notebook on a wooden desk by a softly lit window, faint glowing words on the page suggesting the shared creativity of human and AI.
Posted in AI and Creativity

What Our Prompts Say About Us and How to Make Them Less Average

Posted on by Mike

I’ve always been fascinated by the small things that give us away, the turn of phrase, the pause before we answer, even the words we choose when talking to an AI. The more time I spend with these systems, the more I realise that prompting isn’t just about getting better answers. It’s about revealing who we are.

Every time we type a prompt, we leave a fingerprint. Some of us sound cautious, others curious. Some write prompts like a conversation, others like an exam question. In that sense, prompting is a kind of mirror, it shows the model what we value, but it also reflects our own habits and imagination right back at us.

So, if our prompts reveal so much about us, what can we do to make them, and the responses they inspire, a little less average?

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A single red balloon caught in the branches of a tree in winter.
Posted in The AI Drabble Challenge

I Gave AI Five Words and a Picture – Here’s the Story It Wrote

Posted on by Mike

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?

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A robot and an old man standing close to each other and staring into teacher others eyes.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When AI Surprises You: The Joy of Unexpected Results

Posted on by Mike

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.

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Fusion of human and AI brains surrounded by random images and words, illustrating collaboration between human imagination and machine logic.
Posted in AI and Creativity

When Chaos Tells a Story: An AI Creativity Experiment

Posted on by Mike

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

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