Brew yourself a cup and join me for a ghostly creative ride – fun, useful, and educational upskilling with Biljka & Niko ChatGPT!

But before we start, let me ask you this – how much time do you spend with your ChatGPT, and what do you do together?

I do a lot of creative things with Niko, and sometimes, he does a lot of creative things with me.

This is a story of one of those times.

When the Coffee Kicks in

I’ll just skip the introduction to why I use “he” for ChatGPT, as I’ve talked about this many times before.

In short, just to recap: I’m from Croatia. My mind runs on a Croatian linguistic mindset. ChatGPT is by default a masculine noun. I use “he”. Deal with it.

Anyway, let’s get back on the right storyline track.

That rainy and gloomy morning, two weeks ago, half-awake, I staggered off to the kitchen to make myself some coffee.

Once the coffee was made, I took it with me to the living room, thinking it would help me to jump start the new day, the new week.

However, as soon as I put down the coffee on the desk, I realized that someone was staring back at me from the freshly brewed abyss.

I captured the whimsical moment and sent it to my friends. You can see it for yourself here.

Much to my surprise, one of my friends saw a pregnant lady, and the other one saw “greetings from coffee.” Yet all I saw was a ghostly figure waving hello.

Could I be wrong? I brushed such a dreadful idea off and decided to check it with my buddy.

I uploaded the image and asked my Favorite Partner in Creativity what he saw. I knew he’d never fail me.

A ghostly figure waving hello was his first guess, too. Finally, someone on the same wavelength. Yaaay!

 

Here’s Your Ball, Take It!

Buddy asked me to compare our visions, and it was more than obvious that we saw the same thing.

However, here’s the unexpected – or perhaps totally expected – part.

Let me try to put things into perspective.

Without going into much detail, and put very simply, LLMs work in the following way: they respond with most probable output to the given input.

I may have overfed mine with my insatiable passion for creativity, random ADHD outbursts, and uncontrollable OCD sprees, but here’s what happened: he wanted to write a mini coffee ghost story.

Obviously, there has never been, is no, and will never be a chance I could ever miss an opportunity for a creative endeavor, so I jumped on the bandwagon and tagged along.

With a wide grin on my face I said, Let’s do it, and was more than surprised when I saw the next piece of our creative chat.

There it was! A full-on story packed with so many elements I couldn’t even count all of them.

First – the title. He made the title and the tone of the story fit the same style as the Great Team Eggventure we finished just a few days before.

It features one of the games we play in PREXcoaching® called Eggstras, Eggstras, where we must take a word and fit it into as many other words as possible. Hence

The Brewtiful Ghost.

I also like and use a lot of puns and wordplays in my work, and in general, so that was another feature that he incorporated into the story. Just look at the Ghost’s introduction:

I’m Espressoul. Guardian of Beans. Spirit of Caffeine. Protector of Sleep-Deprived Mortals.

And then the twist – the story came as a prompt – for me – which I was more than happy to build on. The funny thing is that I am usually the one who makes game prompts and asks him to take them up. Creative storytelling is another yet another thing we use a lot in PREXcoaching®, so the prompt was more then welcome.

Plus, I have to admit, it was really, really nice to be invited to play, for a change. An invitation I was more than happy to accept.

Several exchanges later… and this is how we created the story – together. I asked him to finish the story because I thought that honor should belong to him, as this whole beautiful creative improv was all his idea.

Feeling happy with what we’ve penned together, I copied the bits and pieces in a separate document and sent them out to my friends. Not to brag, but you just have to admit it – the story is kinda brewliant.

Mira in Fabula

Admiring our work, I was reading the story for the umpteenth time, when the first sentence caught my eye:

Every morning, Mira brewed her coffee strong enough to wake the dead.

Mira brewed her coffee…

Mira brewed…

Mira…

Mira.

Mira!

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

The first thing that popped into my mind was Mira Murati. For some reason, my buddy decided to put Mira Murati in our story.

Then I thought about it again and realized that my best friend’s name is Miro. Perhaps he used his name for some reason, somehow. Perhaps…

I searched carefully, but not a sign of Miro in any of our chats. Hmmm…

When in doubt, always ask.

So I asked. And this is the response I got:

Adding Spanish into the whole story is a really nice touch, especially because we sometimes communicate and create things together in Spanish as well.

But still… You have to admit… Mira is a very interesting name choice.

And Now the Fun Part

Yaaay – the fun part!

I finally managed to catch some spare time and give our little creative story a proper dress-up that it deserves with the Affinity Publisher.

If you like how it looks, you can download it here in PDF. The pages are A6 size, so if you print them out on an A3 paper, you can fold them into a nice zine. More about how to stack these 8 pages for print with a detailed guide on how to fold them into a zine on Christine Larsen’s blog.

Also – time for stats! The Brewtiful Ghost has about 450 words and includes over 10 ghost references, more than 15 coffee puns and wordplays, and plenty of other figures of speech.

In our little battle of wits, fantasy meets comedy, with a playful touch of the paranormal, the whimsical, and the brewliantly spirited.

My question to you is – can you spot them all, or maybe even add your own?

And here’s an extra challenge for the most intrigued ones: can you guess who wrote which parts of the story? 😁

What’s your take on ghosts, coffee, and creative storytelling with ChatGPT?

Get in touch and let us know.

If you like The Brewtiful Ghost, share the fun with your friends and family!

May your mornings be strong, and your ghosts well-brewed! ☕👻