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”
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”
I never meant to fall down the AI rabbit hole.
My curiosity about artificial intelligence really began when I stumbled across Midjourney and ChatGPT. Midjourney appeared in 2022 like a digital paintbrush, allowing anyone to turn words into images, surreal, beautiful, and sometimes downright strange. After trying it out, I was hooked and still use it widely today. In fact, the image that accompanies this post was created by Midjourney. I’ll talk more about AI and image creation in a future post.
Continue reading “Falling Down the AI Rabbit Hole: How Curiosity Led Me to Midjourney and ChatGPT”
The AI Grandad 