“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never worn.” Or… “Underwear.”
There’s a famous story about a group of authors competing to write the shortest story possible. According to legend, Ernest Hemingway won the contest with six words: “For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
I wanted to create a story even shorter than that. One word. And that word is…
“Underwear.”
Alas, it’s a fun word, but it is lacking in narrative. Until, that is, you put it into a variety of artificial intelligence “content generators.”
These are now many sophisticated A.I. applications available to the public that can take a few simple words and turn them into complex stories, and even book-length tomes. For this particular project, I used jasper.ai, an A.I. content creator that does an amazing job at writing non-fiction material, and performs some really “interesting” work when using its “creative” story-telling template.
The first few tales in Underwear Stories were “written” using this “creative” template and the one-word prompt: “underwear.” This particular application also requests a “tone of voice” for the content (see image below).
For the first four stories in the collection, I used four different voices: Shakespeare, Stephen King, Tolkien, and Mark Twain. Good luck guessing which one is which.
After “writing” several stories this way, I wanted to expand my range of content. Most A.I. generators “create” their output based on the input you give them. But I was committed to only using one word as my “prompt.” This eventually proved limiting. However, there are also A.I. “prompt generators” — applications that make text suggestions to use as prompts for other A.I. content generators.
So I put the word “underwear” into Typestitch, an “A.I. prompt writing assistant” (see below).
I generated ten prompts, and then put those prompts into the Jasper “creative” template. I’m still only working with the one word “underwear,” but it has been expanded by an A.I. prompt assistant, and then expanded further by an A.I. story generator.
I’ve published the best results, including one that ended up being a lot “racier” than I expected. (Many A.I. platforms try to filter out explicit material — but not this time.)
This is only the first-round of “Underwear Stories.” There are more to come in the future, as well as short story collections based on other single-word prompts. But for now? All I have is…
Underwear.
(Thanks to Robert Moritz at thecreative.ai for assistance and inspiration with this project.)