Tag: Writing

A frail dying old man, emaciated face with sunken cheeks and deep wrinkles. Wearing a heavy, rusty cyberpunk neuro-helmet over his head with glowing red interface lights.
Posted in stories

Lost Memories: A Tale of Memory Extraction at Seventy-Three

Posted on by Mike

They told me it would be painless. They always tell you it will be painless.

I was seventy-three when they fitted the first interface. A volunteer, they called me. Pioneer. That word tasted sweet once. Now it sits in my throat like old copper wire. They needed someone whose mind had already softened at the edges, they said. Someone whose memories had grown loose, easy to pull free like teeth from rotting gum. The young ones held too tight. Their thoughts fought back. Mine, they said, would cooperate.

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An alien smoking at a bar.
Posted in stories

AI Writes Melancholic Monologue About Earth

Posted on by Mike

What happens when you show an AI a picture of a world-weary alien nursing a whisky in a neon-lit bar and ask it to write a monologue? Honestly, I wasn’t sure either. But the result was melancholy, atmospheric, and unexpectedly moving, which tells you something interesting about where creative AI is heading.

Here is the story in audio, created by ElevenLabs. Followed by the text of the story. Enjoy.

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Rain-soaked Manchester street on Deansgate at dusk, with a thoughtful middle-aged woman in a dark coat standing in the foreground. A pigeon stands in a puddle near her feet while a red bus approaches in the background. Shopfront lights and wet pavement reflections create a sombre, reflective mood suggesting quiet grief and urban isolation.
Posted in stories

Dystopian Grief: A Short Story Exploration

Posted on by Mike

Every now and again I give an AI a single prompt and let it write a short story. I do not edit the result. I simply choose one worth keeping. Below you will find the exact prompt, the story it produced, and one brief thought that stayed with me after reading. Nothing more.

This week I used Claude.

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Whimsical cartoon illustration of a flustered AI robot surrounded by chaotic tasks, including scattered paperwork, a globe covered in notes, a sock drawer labelled “Gravity”, a “Global Domination – Oops!” control panel, a sprinkler spraying water, and an open sourdough recipe book, suggesting humorous incompetence rather than world domination.
Posted in AI and Creativity

Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike

Posted on by Mike

I recently discovered that in the dashboard of my blog WordPress put in suggested writing prompts. I thought it might be fun to put one of these prompts to three of my favourite chatbots, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The prompt was:

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

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Posted in AI and Creativity

Claude’s Obituary: A Reflection on AI and Humanity

Posted on by Mike

We write obituaries for people we have lost. We gather the facts of a life, the dates, the achievements, the relationships, and try to compress a person into something that fits on a page. It is, when you think about it, an impossible task. And yet we try, because the alternative is silence.

I found myself wondering recently what would happen if I asked Claude to write its own obituary. Not as a morbid exercise, but as a genuine inquiry. What would it choose to include? What would it claim to have valued? And what does the gap between what it writes and what it can actually experience tell us about what it is?

I gave Claude a single instruction: write your own obituary. I did not tell it to be funny, or sad, or philosophical. I just asked it to write one.

This is what it produced.

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