Hey everyone! For this week’s blog post on AI, I tried out an AI Story Generator on ToolBaz. When I was in school, in English/English language arts class, anytime we had to write a story, I could literally never make up my mind about what to write. Whenever we would create brainstorming webs or anything, I would spend a whole class at least creating multiple different webs for different storylines. Sometimes I would even get half started on a rough draft and switch to another topic I had in mind. As you can imagine, this took a lot of time out of what we were given to actually write the story. With this story generator I found, students struggling to make a decision like me could try it out. ToolBaz had a whole variety of different AI tools depending on if you needed help with article writing, story writing, poems, and more. I highly suggest checking it out.

When you open the site, it gives you the question “What do you want to write your story about?” I was hoping it would have more of a baseline or certain prompts for specific parts of a story when creating one, but I ended up liking the open-endedness of it. To start, I just put a couple of terms down that came to mind when I thought of a short story:

• small town
• mystery
• teenagers
• two boys
• two girls

My prompts were very vague as I was just experimenting, but the story it ended up creating out of that little information genuinely surprised me.

This is what it came up with. It gave my small town prompt a name and even came up with a mystery and resolution, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was how it gave the two girls and two boys I mentioned entire personalities with interests and hobbies. I should’ve expected an elaborate answer from AI, but it honestly scared me with how much it was able to make up. I was going to add another prompt to the others to see how much of a change it would make in the story, but I accidentally refreshed the page, and it gave me a completely new story following the same previous prompt. I liked how it would create different stories using the same five prompts each time to show different directions the story could go in. I did add the word ‘tragedy’ to the other prompts, and it basically just gave me the same baseline of the story, except the mystery didn’t get fully solved in the end like the others.

I also found a whole bunch of other tools on the site that AI generates ideas for each. One of the ones I tried that I thought fit in with brainstorming story ideas is the ‘Story Character Gene” tool. This was the same idea; it asked for some details for my character, then generated an entire character, including an appearance, background, personality, and more. I thought this was also a really neat and easy way for students to bring their characters to life in a way.

I think this tool would be extremely beneficial in the classroom and really helpful for some students. By being able to create a base idea for the story they may have in mind, once generated, they can pick out the things they like and don’t like about it to keep generating until they are happy with the outcome. Once they have a solid idea, they can get to writing or typing it out themselves. Students will need to understand this tool is an aid and there to assist them in brainstorming, not to do the work for them (even though it’d be pretty obvious to tell it’s AI). All the other related tools can also be super helpful when creating different aspects, such as characters. I definitely see myself using this in my future classroom.