Tag: Writing with AI

A human hand and a robotic hand both writing in a notebook, words floating into the air,
Posted in AI and Creativity

Does the Average Reader Care If a Story Is Written by AI?

Posted on by Mike

I’ve been wondering about this lately. As someone who experiments with AI to write everything from short stories to blog posts, I often ask myself: does it really matter to the reader who wrote the words, me or the machine? I have a lot of writer friends who say that it does.

But the more I explore, the more personal it feels. I’ve watched people read my AI-written stories with genuine emotion, only for that expression to shift when I reveal the author wasn’t entirely human. It’s in that moment, between curiosity and unease, that I realise we’re in new storytelling territory.

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A face rising out of a steaming coffee mug
Posted in AI and Creativity

The Last Cup: When AI Writes About Burnout Better Than We Do

Posted on by Mike

Every now and again, I like to let AI take the pen, or in this case, the keyboard. The Last Cup is one of those experiments: a short story written entirely by AI with no edits from me. What fascinates me is how it captures something so human, exhaustion, ambition, and that quiet realisation that work might be drinking us dry. It made me wonder: when AI writes about burnout, is it simply echoing us, or holding up a mirror we’d rather not face?

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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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