Tag: Writing with AI

A factory worker in blue overalls sits at a production line inspecting small grey units, his expression subdued while colleagues clap in the background. In the foreground, a laminated “Employee of the Month” certificate misspells his name as “Darryn.” To one side, a screen displays pressure test results, and a red bin marked “Defective Units” holds rejected items. On the wall behind him, a sign counts down “314 Februaries left before retirement,” adding a quiet, unsettling note to the otherwise routine workplace scene.
Posted in stories

Productivity

Posted on by Mike

I have got Claude to create an agent called ‘The AI Grandad Story Agent’ which is able to write short stories for me. Here is one of them…

They gave me a certificate last Tuesday. Employee of the Month, February, laminated and everything. Karen from HR stood in the break room and started clapping, so everyone else did too, because that’s what you do when Karen starts clapping. The certificate has my name spelled wrong. Darryn instead of Darren. I didn’t like to say anything.

What I do, specifically, is remove the defective units from the line before they reach packaging. A defective unit is any unit that fails the pressure test. The machine tells me which ones fail. I remove them and place them in the red bin. Someone else deals with the red bin. I don’t know who. I’ve worked here eleven years and I don’t know what we manufacture. The units are grey. They are approximately the size of a fist. Management said knowing the end-use wasn’t relevant to my role, and I suppose they’re right.

My targets went up in January. They went up in January last year too. I asked Adrian, my line manager, whether they would go up again next January, and he said I was demonstrating a really negative attitude and that the certificate was meant to be a morale intervention. I nodded and said thank you for the certificate.

I have three hundred and fourteen Februaries left before retirement, assuming the pension age doesn’t move again. Which I am quite sure it will.

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” →
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” →
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.

Continue reading “Too Hot, Too Cold, Too Wrong” →
A dimly lit government office with a long empty table covered in neatly arranged documents and folders, illuminated by cold fluorescent lights, creating a quiet but unsettling bureaucratic atmosphere.
Posted in AI Experiments

Oulipo and AI: Unleashing Literary Potential

Posted on by Mike

Today I have been exploring ‘Oulipo’, which is short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”. This was a French literary movement founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. The group believed that creative constraints, far from limiting a writer, could unlock new possibilities that free writing would never discover.

Continue reading “Oulipo and AI: Unleashing Literary Potential” →