Backwoods Boy

Remarkable results, Terry. I'm not going to hazard a guess at how many tries it took to produce this. It's an addictive toy, though, and on rare occasions produces what you want.

Incest aside, I doubt very much that a long-time participant like Chris would violate a fundamental age-related (adult/minor) GA guideline.

Hey, it's a British mystery. The butler did it, of course.

I really like this story. You do very well with emotion and drama - not to mention detail. Keep up the good work

This raises an interesting point. Less is more, and more is counterproductive. The flower, though perhaps the most creative AI could manage, is excellent. I've found that excessive instructions, even if innocuous, are prone to offend the input and output monitors, while simple carefully-worded instructions produce desired and often surprising results. In between the monitors, AI seems to take hints well. Here's the composite results of another attempt. It makes me wonder if (1) a set of pictures might be a good prompt and (2) the misinterpretations might be more effective than the intended results. The descriptive text was "A blond teenage boy with a crew-cut wearing blue jeans and a white muscle shirt filling his automobile gas tank from an old-fashioned pump at a 1930's gas station in a rural town". AI did fairly well with the setting and the physical description (other than the crew-cut part), but it doesn't seem to understand the process. The poor kid either couldn't find the hole, found the wrong hole, or when he found the right one, had a bit of a problem getting it in. A picture is worth a thousand words, and I'm sure one could write a thousand-word story off this one. 😈

@raven1 in my opinion, editors (and beta-readers sometimes alias proofreaders) are fundamental to a good story. I'll always be grateful to @Brayon, @MJC, and @WolfM for adding depth and keeping me honest, and I'm delighted to see you working with Craig in that capacity.

A great start to this story. The characters are all very real and unique, and the dramatic aspects are very realistic. I still need to read a lot of the intervening stories, but this one stands alone well, and it's going to be a long winter with plenty of time to catch up. Congratulations to you (and your editor) for this effort.

Good thing they're wearing socks. I'd hate to see their toes As I mentioned elsewhere, my current avatar is a product of this tool. "...with hands in front pockets" solves most of the digit problems, but one might still speculate about the reach of the fingers given the length of the thumbs 🤔

Quite. I produced a Raven on a Native-American's shoulder that had that same foot disease. I agree with @Krista on the hands/fingers/toes issue - and it seems to extend to other species.

I've been spending too much time with this toy. Mine are tending towards "rural", as one might expect. Here's one that might make a prompt, including the minor AI-induced physical defect. Tip: The application is best used late at night when demand is down.

I love this story! Too bad we can't all find a talisman like the typewriter that will help us resolve the past. Keep up the good work!

Is she an author on the side? 🤔

Reaching for a spoiler here, eh? I bet enquiring minds will have to want in one hand and... well, never mind that expression. Let's just say I doubt that instant gratification will be forthcoming.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you have painted a thought-provoking one with far fewer than that. Thanks for, once again, sharing your poetic skills and insights.

A theme of "finding one's place in the world" weaves a continuous thread throughout the Running with the Pack series, but nowhere does "belonging" surface more clearly than in this short addition to the series. Though it has enough background to stand alone, this three chapter story is the perfect postscript to Higher Education, and a teaser to start at the very beginning - a very good place to start.

Far be it from me to make plot suggestions, but I have high hopes that Seth will bug @WolfM sufficiently to be the focal point of the next adventure in this series.

This is progressing in a very interesting manner. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Having played with the tool for a while now, to return briefly to the title question - "AI Art - Good Prompts?" - I would say, yes, given something sufficiently general and thought provoking. Most of the examples in this thread are (deliberately) focused on a specific genre, theme, etc. The most successful prompts on GA have been the more general ones, in my opinion. The tool's mistakes - such as @raven1's two brothers with the extra head - might be the most thought-provoking for the purposes of a prompt. 🤔 As to the observations about failures, note the wording of the message: "Unsafe Image Content Detected". And a later phrase: "...we detected unsafe content in the images...". It's the AI art generator that's on trial here, not the user. I put in an apparently innocuous request, and it resulted in failure. Requests with clear potential for misinterpretation produce failure one time and success the next. And if you read the content policy, anything that could possibly offend any society that exists or ever existed on the face of the earth is included. Pity the poor AI generator trying to interpret your phrase while producing politically-correct material. It's just a toddler at this point. Hopefully it's learning from its failures.

For someone who never got past stick figures, this holds marvelous potential

An excellent beginning to a seasonal spooky story. I'll be looking forward to more 👻

An incredibly realistic story about real three-dimensional people. Thanks for sharing your creativity.

Thanks for the further education. I never got into the nitty-gritty of internet technology during my CS career, and haven't pursued learning about the changes since. A PM with another contributor to this conversation suggests that, besides ignorance, my problem is likely associated with "Google" and "Chromebook". And perhaps my choice of supplemental virus protection. As to cookies, for a long time I refused to accept any cookies except from a known list of sites. Tickie Stories, along with some other sites, wasn't on that list as I never had a problem accessing them. Now that I've come off that piece of paranoia, I find cookies from those sites. Since I always review the "cookies of the day" before deleting them, the Tickie item was a first-time experience. I once asked Chuck how he supported the site and got no response. I think it was a personal hobby, but it's still sad that he didn't bequeath it to someone. I applaud your intent to download the site, and I hope you succeed. Since I don't always save all versions of my stories, I've downloaded my own stuff with the idea that, with a certain amount of modification, they might be useful "elsewhere"

When accessing the site from a Google search, as I've always done, the "www" is in the address, and until today that has always succeeded. I'm far from an expert on the internet, but the fact that it can now only be reached without that part, and that the Google search address resulted in a warning that the site lacked certification followed by an error message when I ignored the warning, suggests to me that the site is slipping away by inches rather than with a bang. I also noted that the site put a cookie on my computer this morning, something it has never done before. I may be overly paranoid, but that raised a yellow flag. 🤔

Well, that is interesting. I can get it from your link but not from the link a google search provides as is my usual habit. Perhaps it's a personal problem - for now. So I'll bookmark your link and see what happens. Thanks.

For the purpose of informing of those interested in the general area of gay story sites, this is what Tickie Stories displays this morning: