Tag: Writing

A humorous, Tim Burton-style blue monster with tentacle-like hair, uneven eyes, sharp teeth, and long fingers. It stands on two legs and looks directly at the viewer while a speech bubble says “Give me a caption.”
Posted in AI and Creativity

Give This AI Image a Caption #2 – The Song Only He Can Hear

Posted on by Mike

I was browsing through my AI images this week when I stumbled across this one, and it stopped me cold. There’s something achingly beautiful about it. Quiet. Tender. Almost ghostly. The sort of picture that feels like it already contains a story, if only we lean in close enough to hear it.

I won’t tell you what I see. That would get in the way. Instead, I’ll let you sit with it for a moment and see what it stirs in you.

Here it is.

A young child in worn, old-fashioned clothing sits in a doorway of a crumbling building, gently playing an aged violin as soft light falls across them.

The light, the dust, the decay, the expression… every element feels like it’s whispering something. Is this a moment of hope? Loneliness? Magic? Memory? Survival? A lullaby to the past or a plea to the future?

Whatever it is, it’s begging for words. And that’s where you come in.

Your Turn, Caption This Image

Give me your best caption in the comments. It can be:

  • wistful
  • poetic
  • mysterious
  • uplifting
  • heartbreaking
  • or something entirely unexpected

There’s no right or wrong way to interpret it, just your imagination meeting the image halfway.

Next week, I’ll share a selection of my favourite captions, and I might even try weaving one or two into a tiny story.

A Closing Thought

Every so often, an AI image arrives that feels less like a picture and more like a doorway. This one made me wonder about the power of quiet moments — the ones that happen when nobody’s watching, when the world falls away, and someone creates something just because they must.

So… what do you think this child is playing? And who, or what, is the music for?

About The AI Grandad

Find out more about The AI Grandad on:
YouTube – The AI Grandad
X – The AI Grandad

What do you think AI creativity tells us about ourselves?
Share your thoughts in the comments, I love hearing from curious minds!

A digital clock face showing" 10:17." The background is dark and mysterious
Posted in AI and Creativity

How an Unusual Prompt Changed the Story Completely

Posted on by Mike

When people talk about AI writing, they often focus on what they ask it to do. Write a horror story. Write a cosy mystery. Write something in the style of a particular author. All perfectly reasonable requests.

But in my own experiments, I’ve found that the real shift happens when I stop giving AI sensible instructions and start giving it slightly awkward ones instead. Not genre. Not tone. A rule. A constraint that feels just a little unnatural. That’s when the writing stops drifting and starts making decisions.

This post is about one of those experiments.

Continue reading “How an Unusual Prompt Changed the Story Completely” →
A notebook on a wooden desk with colourful creative energy swirling out of it in bright, abstract shapes.
Posted in AI and Creativity

The Creative Renaissance No One Saw Coming (And Why It’s Just Getting Started)

Posted on by Mike

There’s a moment, every so often, when history quietly changes direction and most of us don’t notice because we’re too busy doing other things. The printing press began as a technical curiosity long before it became a cultural turning point. Electricity, too, slipped into daily life one room at a time. When the internet appeared, most of us treated it as a mild curiosity. Something interesting, certainly, but hardly the force that would reshape how we live, work and tell stories.The world rarely recognises a revolution at the moment it begins. Most of us only understand what changed when we look back.

Continue reading “The Creative Renaissance No One Saw Coming (And Why It’s Just Getting Started)” →
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 – Week #8: An Alphabet Sevenling

Posted on by Mike

Welcome back to the AI Drabble Challenge, a weekly experiment in human and AI creativity. Each Wednesday, I will set a prompt to inspire a Drabble, a story told in exactly 100 words.

You can use any AI model you like (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, or others), or several at once. 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.

This Week’s Prompt

This week I thought I would try something different. I’m always intrigued as to how AI copes when asked unusual questions (have a read of The Prompt Experiment to see an example of this).

So, today’s prompt is to write a Drabble where every sentence must start with the next letter of the alphabet – A → B → C → D → etc. To add to the fun, ask AI to write it as a Sevenling poem. A Sevenling is a seven-line poem built around a structure of three lines, three lines, and finish with one line. The example below will make this much clearer.

This is stretching AI to play with more than one instruction, both being somewhat unrelated!

Example Sevenling Drabble – ‘The City That Listens’

I used ChatGPT 5.1 and the prompt was – “Write a sinister, dystopian, alphabet sevenling of 100 words. Every sentence must start with the next letter of the alphabet”

All around us in the ruined district, alarms wailed softly as automated drones circled overhead.
Beneath the fractured sky, buildings leaned inward as though eavesdropping on our trembling breaths.
Concrete shadows drifted across the pavements, carrying rumours of vanished citizens and forbidden machinery.

Deep within the echoing tunnels, distant voices repeated our names long before we arrived.
Evening descended abruptly, erasing colours and leaving only silhouettes shaped like unfinished memories.
Further ahead, a flicker of movement suggested the city itself was learning to listen.

Gathering courage, we stepped forward together, unaware the ground had already chosen which one to keep.

How to Take Part

  1. Write your 100-word Drabble with help from an AI tool (or two).
  2. Post your story in the comments, or publish it on your own website and include a pingback to this post.
  3. If you can, share which AI model(s) you used and the prompt that started your process, we can all learn from each other.

Community & Highlights

Each week, I’ll read through the entries, share a few favourites, and highlight one that particularly stood out, for originality, style, or the inventive way it used AI.

This isn’t about competition; it’s about curiosity, experimentation, and celebrating how humans and machines can create together.

A Closing Thought

AI gives us the tools, but we give it meaning. Let’s see what stories emerge this week, 100 words at a time.

Your Turn!

Now it’s over to you, can you craft your own 100-word Drabble inspired by this week’s prompt.

Post your story in the comments below or link to your own blog, I love seeing the imaginative twists readers come up with. So don’t be shy, join in and show us what your AI + Your Imagination can do!

New to the challenge? Visit The AI Drabbles Challenge Page for all the details and past prompts.

A humorous, Tim Burton-style blue monster with tentacle-like hair, uneven eyes, sharp teeth, and long fingers. It stands on two legs and looks directly at the viewer while a speech bubble says “Give me a caption.”
Posted in AI and Creativity

Give This AI Image a Caption #1 – The Monday Morning Meeting Nobody Asked For

Posted on by Mike

I was experimenting with Midjourney again this week, the digital equivalent of rummaging in a curiosity shop, when it produced an image that made me stop, blink, and mutter “What on earth…?” into the quiet of the room.

Not because it was beautiful. Not because it was meaningful. But because it looked uncannily like the sort of gathering you’d stumble into if you took a wrong turn inside a Tim Burton film.

I won’t explain it. That would ruin the fun. Instead, I’ll let you take it in and decide for yourself what kind of meeting these peculiar beings are having… and why the one in the middle looks like they’d very much like to leave.

A surreal, Tim Burton-style illustration showing a nervous stick-figure person surrounded by four bizarre, wide-eyed monsters: a black spiky one, a red blobby one, and two blue creatures — one offering a steaming cup. All appear to be staring at the central figure.

I spent a good minute trying to work out whether these creatures were:

  • interviewing the poor soul in the middle,
  • arguing about who has to drink the coffee,
  • or simply waiting for someone to explain why they were all summoned here at 9am.

Whatever’s going on, one thing is certain: this image desperately needs a caption. And that’s where you come in.

Your Turn, Caption This Image

Give me your best line in the comments.

It can be:

  • silly
  • serious
  • poetic
  • ominous
  • cheerfully unhinged
  • or something so perfect I’ll wish I’d thought of it myself

Next week, I’ll share my favourite captions, and I might even transform one or two into tiny stories. Consider it our weekly creative mischief session between humans and machines.

A Closing Thought

The thing I love most about AI images is that they don’t care about logic. They’ll happily hand you a scene that feels like a cross between a nightmare, a cartoon, and a philosophical debate about hot beverages. And somehow, in the middle of all that strangeness, your imagination wakes up.

So… what do you think is really happening here?

About The AI Grandad

Find out more about The AI Grandad on:
YouTube – The AI Grandad
X – The AI Grandad

What do you think AI creativity tells us about ourselves?
Share your thoughts in the comments, I love hearing from curious minds!