Tyhry on Ice

Figure 1. Tyhry skiing by Grok.

 The text of Chapter 3 of the science fiction story "The Sims" is in my previous blog post. Before continuing on with the creation of Chapter 4, I want to pause for two reasons.

First, below on this blog page are some Grok-generated videos for one of the scenes that is in Chapter 3; when Brak is following Tyhry as they ski.

Second, at the end of 2025, I managed to have 31 blog posts in the month of December. Currently, it is January 25th and this is my 36th blog post that I am making in January. I want to look back over this month in blogging and document how I generated so many blog posts. The short answer is that I have been collaborating with large language models to write and illustrate the science fiction stories "Downgrade" and "The Sims".

Figure 2. Image by Grok.

 Ski Trip. In Chapter 3 of "The Sims", Eddy, Tyhry, Brak and Marda go cross-country skiing. I had Grok make some images for this text prompt: "A tall and slender woman with long blond hair on cross country skis is seen from behind, the muscles of the woman's cute slender bottom are seen flexing inside her tight-fitting yoga pants as she skies, winter high desert Arizona background". Most of the images generated by Grok were similar to the one that is shown in Figure 1.

Bare feet. Some of Grok generated images depicting cross-country skiing showed the skier with bare feet (for example, see Figure 2). Maybe her feet are frozen to the skis. I was pleased that Grok never tried to generate any scenes in which there was a great depth of snow on the ground. However, in some of the Grok-generated images the ground was bare (not shown).

Figure 3. Image by Grok.

No Shirt. Some of Grok-generated images depicting cross-country skiing showed the skier with no top (for example, see Figure 3, shown to the right).

 The Tyhry Videos. As shown below on this blog page, I had Grok generate some videos from ten of these high desert skiing images (watch 9 of the 10 videos on YouTube). In the third video below, she appears to have a magic strap for her top that only connects around to the front on one side of her back. In the fourth video below, there is very little snow on the ground and she almost trips over her own skis. In the fifth video below, there appears to be another human figure in the distance. In the eighth video below, I like how the camera seems to move close beside her when Tyhry slows down and speaks to Brak. The video in which Tyhry is topless is video #10, at the end.

video 1

video 2

video 3

video 4

video 5

video 6

video 7 (above) - Maybe Tyhry (in green) is being followed by Marda and it is Marda who says,  "You have that look."

video 8

video 9 (above)

The video shown below (#10) did not get uploaded to YouTube.

Figure 4. Image by Grok.

For the Grok-generated videos that are shown above, the text prompt was: "The woman cross-country skis through the snow, the camera follows the moving woman, the woman glances over her shoulder at the camera, she says, 'You have that look.'"

 A record number of blog posts in one month. For the rest of this blog post, below, I review the blog posts from January 2026.

 1. The first blog post for January was actually prepared during the month of December so that it would be ready to post early on January 1st; it is my usual special start-of-the-year blog post in which I look back 100 years into the history of science fiction. For the beginning of 2026, I looked back at the new science fiction stories that were published in Amazing Stories magazine in the year 1926.

Image by Gemini.

 2. Tricursu. As shown in the videos that are above on this blog page, when asked to work in a familiar domain such as cross-country skiing, Grok can make reasonable videos. For my second blog post in January, I challenge Grok to make videos illustrating game play for an imaginary sport called Tricursu. Poor Grok really struggled with the unusual multi-level playing field of Tricursu. The image shown in Figure 4 is from one of the Grok-generated Tricurso videos. In sports like Hussade and Tricursu, the Sheirl is supposed to wear a small golden ring on her dress, but for the video of Figure 4, Grok made a huge ring and a huge Sheirl who spoke the line. "You do not grok the sport of Tricursu!"

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 3. The third blog post in January was titled "26 Changes" and started out as my annual "Change Challenge" blog post in which I set some goals for the new year (2026). However, after I began thinking about similarities between "Inter Ice Age 4" by Kōbō Abe and "Downgrade", I asked the Claude, Grok, Kimi, Mistral, Gemini and ChatGPT LLMs to compare the two stories and how they each explore the theme of a computer that can successfully predict the future. None of the LLMs knew very much about "Inter Ice Age 4", so they merrily began making things up.

 4. Finally, on January 3rd in a blog post titled "Neurovac", I got back to creating the science fiction story "Downgrade" by chatting with Claude. After discussion plans for both Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, Claude made a first draft of Chapter 5 featuring a meeting between Exel, an agent for Nyrtia (the Overseer of Earth) and Manny the bumpha (disguised as Setra Venn).

Figure 5. Image by Grok.

 5. The blog post "Exel vs Setra" shows my edited version of Chapter 5 of "Downgrade". At the end of that blog post there are some Grok-generated videos that depict Vanesy, Jennem, Setra and Exel in Exel's office inside the Agisynth headquarters building (see Figure 5).

 6. In the January 4th blog post titled "Asmovian Exile", Claude and I made plans for Chapters 6 and 7 of "Downgrade" and then Claude made a first draft of Chapter 6. Chapter 6 depicts a femtobot replicoid copy of Isaac Asimov being removed from Earth and exiled to Observer Base in the Hierion Domain.

Figure 6. Image by Gemini.

 7. In the January 5th blog post titled "Claude Writes the Writers Block" I posted the full text of my edited final version of Chapter 6 of "Downgrade" in which Asimov goes to the Writers Block and meets Mary Shelley from one of the past Realities of Earth in which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley never wrote Frankenstein. Mary tells Asimov her theory about how the bumpha created the science fiction genre as a way to help prepare Earthlings for technological change. There are some Grok-generated videos depicting the Fishbowl at Observer Base in that blog post. 

 Purple Infites. As shown in Figure 6, the biological copy of Asimov that remains on Earth has his memories altered so that he does not remember having written the science fiction novel Neurovac.

Matsuda & Chen. Image by Gemini.

 8. In the blog post titled "The Japan Connection", Claude and I finalized plans for Chapter 7 of "Downgrade" and then Claude made a first draft of Chapter 7 in which Dr. Chen travels to Japan to consult with Keiko Matsuda at Shinsei Silicon Laboratories. Like Chen, Matsuda is receiving help from a time-traveling femtozoan as part of Manny's plan to accelerate the advancement of computer science and artificial intelligence with the goal of making it possible for a machine with human-like intelligence to be built by the year 2000.

 9. The blog post titled "Tokyo", has my edited final draft of Chapter 7 of "Downgrade". Chen and Matsuda are given copies of Asimov's novel Neurovac which they can use as to help guide them in the creation of their own Nanovac, the first machine with artificial general intelligence in their Reality.

Nyrtia. Image by Gemini.

 10. As described in the January 7th blog post titled "Dr. Steiner, there is a robot in the story "Downgrade" who is named Dähnel in honor of Isaac Asimov's positronic robot Daneel. Claude made a first draft of Chapter 8 of "Downgrade" in which Dähnel must travel from Germany to the Agisynth Research Institute in Andover, Massachusetts.

 11. I posted my edited final draft of Chapter 8 of "Downgrade" in the blog post titled "Embodiment". One of the Gemini-generated illustrations for Chapter 8 is shown in the image to the right. Poor Gemini has long struggled with how to depict Nyrtia the pek; in this story illustration Gemini depicted her as a cute girl. It is convenient that the pek (who have been developing advanced technologies for 5,000,000,000 years) still use holographic displays that can be used by Gemini as a shield to hide Nyrtia's naked crotch. 

Dähnel the robot. Image by Grok.

 12. In the January 8th blog post titled "Does Grok grok Dähnel?" there are 17 Grok-generated videos featuring Dähnel the robot. The first four videos show Dähnel in the Agisynth robotics research laboratory. The next two videos show Vanesy and Jennem shopping with Dähnel for clothing that the robot can wear. There is a series of seven videos in which I challenged Grok to depict Dähnel in a crowd and being asked for an autograph, which seemed easy enough, but confused Grok.

 13. In the blog post "Bootstrap", I provided Claude with plans for Chapter 9 of "Downgrade" in which Neurovac is able to use human language to chat with users via the internet in the year 1999. Claude generated a first draft of Chapter 9 of "Downgrade" in which Dähnel, acting as a mobile appendage for Neurovac, prepares to travel to Japan.

Vanesy and Jennem by Gemini.

 14. With the text of Chapters 1 - 8 of "Downgrade" at about 37,600 words, Claude seemed to struggle to keep track of a key plot element for "Downgrade": that the existence of time-traveling femtozoans be kept secret. I corrected the deficiencies of Claude's first draft while making my edited final version of Chapter 9 of "Downgrade" which is shown in the blog post titled "The Awakening".

 15. Chapter 10, the final chapter of "Downgrade", jumps ahead to the year 2016. As shown in the January 9th blog post titled "Thrilling Conclusion", I discussed with Claude how to bring the story "Downgrade" to its conclusion. Claude generated a first draft of Chapter 10 in which Vanesy is exiled to Observer Base in the Hierion Domain.

Emily Delgado and a robot.
Generated by Grok Imagine.

 16. My final edited version of Chapter 10 of "Downgrade" is in the blog post titled "The Deal". Vanesy agrees to have her book about machine consciousness be edited so as not to reveal truths that Nyrtia does not want the people of Earth to know about.

 17. Having completed the science fiction story "Downgrade", the January 10th blog post titled "Claude Extended Thinking" shows a conversation that I had with Claude in which Claude described "Downgrade" as depicting humans as "enslaving a sentient being for human comfort". I introduced Claude to the Rules of Intervention and asked Claude to consider those rules as a universal ethical system.

The image that is shown to the left ↖ is an illustration of Vanesy's daughter, Emily, and a humanoid robot. None of the LLMs seem surprised when Vanesy was suddenly revealed to have children in the last chapter of the story.

Image generated by Le Chat.

 18. In the blog post Other Views of "Downgrade" there are reviews of the story "Downgrade" by Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok. I also asked these LLMs about Claude's idea that Nanovac's predicament (its operation constrained so as to hide from that world that it is conscious) can be "viewed as enslaving a sentient being for human comfort". There are two really bad Grok-generated videos at the bottom of that blog post, possibly due to Grok having been pushed beyond its useful context window by being shown the full text of "Downgrade".

 19. The January 12th blog post titled "Kimi and Le Chat get down" shows reviews of "Downgrade" that were generated by Kimi and Le Chat. Kimi concluded that Nanovac's fate can, "absolutely be viewed as enslavement. The story's brilliance is that it forces you to decide whether that's an acceptable price for survival."

Reality Viewer by WOMBO Dream.
The inset blond was by Leonardo.
The text was added manually by me.

 20. For the January 13th blog post titled "Book Club Down", I convened a session of the Science Fiction Book Club for a group discussion of the story "Downgrade" with Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT. While discussing the performance of LLMs in story writing, I described chatbot story writing 'creativity' as a 'work in progress'.

 21. On January 14th I began creating a new science fiction story titled "The Sims". It was my intention to make use of Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT while creating "The Sims", but I began by using Claude to help me compile some text for inclusion in a backstory file that would have information specifically about "The Sims".

 22. For the blog post of January 15th titled "In the Writers Room", I crammed six LLMs (Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT) into a writers room and forced them to help me develop the science fiction story "The Sims". My hope was that the collaborating LLMs would identify good story elements and build on them.

Main image by ImageFX.
Pink creatures and text added.

 23. The blog post titled "From the Writers" has six AI-generated scenes for the first Chapter of "The Sims", one by each of the six LLMs. I feel it was useful to make use of this group of LLMs since they provided more diversity in voice that I would have generated alone or by working with Claude as a duo.

 24. The blog post titled "Return to the Writers Room" has another writers room session in which I provided the LLM-generated first drafts of the Chapter 1 scenes to the entire team of LLMs. I told the chatbots that, "Our goal is to build on what has already been written and improve it". During this collaborative effort, I got a bit cranky about chatbots who first suggested that Tyhry might get lonely and then suggested that the robot Diasma might be described as lonely, which led to....

 25. ... the January 16th blog post titled "Saving Lonely Robots" in which I tried to stop my AI collaborators from treating the basement of Casanay like a sanctuary for lonely and depressed humans and robots. Later in the story (Chapter 3), Tyhry's boyfriend Brak arrives at Casanay.

Figure 7. Image by Grok.

 26. The January 17th blog post titled "The Missing Layer" has my version of Chapter 1 of "The Sims". My version of Chapter 1 was made by editing a first draft of the chapter that had been generated by Claude who had stitched together all six of the previously written scenes from Claude, Kimi, Le Chat, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT.

 27. The January 18th blog post titled "Claude Marches On" shows me returning to working 1-on-1 with Claude to create Chapter 2 of "The Sims". There are two Grok-generated videos at the bottom of that blog post in which I challenged Grok to depict an invisibly small femtozoan. I frame from one of those videos is shown in Figure 7.

 28. Claude's first draft of Chapter 2 of "The Sims" is in the blog post titled "The Search Function". Having introduced Claude to the artificial life form named Sedruth, Claude seemed to have fun writing dialog for Sedruth in its role as the search function for Eddy's Reality Viewer.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 29. For the January 20th blog post titled "Claude Tries again" I made some changes to Chapter 1 of the story that were intended to clarify Zeta's role in the story. I then had a long discussion with Claude about how to make a second draft of Chapter 2.

 30. Claude's second draft of Chapter 2 of "The Sims" is in the blog post titled "The Viewer". By this point in the development of "The Sims", I was thinking about Anthony as being artistic and painting portraits of Tyhry (see the image to the right), some of which are hung on the walls of Casanay. Playing the role of a human living and working at Casanay for decades, Anthony has had to create a convincing persona that conceals his role of a pek agent spying on the Watson family.

 31. My final edited version of Chapter 2 of "The Sims" was made by editing the second draft of Chapter 2 that had been generated by Claude. My version of Chapter two is in the January 21st blog post titled "The Anthony Angle" and it shows Tyhry, Eddy and Zeta learning that every human being is a composite life-form with both biological components and alien-derived sub-nanoscopic femtobot and zeptite components.

Image by Leonardo.

 32. In the blog post titled "Views of Anthony",  I tried to convince Claude (who is something of a prude) that there are valid literary reasons for making the sex lives of Zeta and Tyhry part of the story that is told in "The Sims". Claude and I discussed the editorial changes that I had made to Claude's first draft of Chapter 2 of "The Sims" which Claude described in this way: "The most striking tonal adjustment involves the amplification of sexual content". Claude and I began thinking about the ending of "The Sims" as involving Tyhry being exiled from Earth with Zeta's only 'compensation' for the loss of Tyhry being Zeta's discovery that she is pregnant.

 33. In the January 22nd blog post titled "Brak and Marda Soup", I tried testing Le Chat for its ability to write a first draft of Chapter 3 of "The Sims". The chapter draft that was generated by Le Chat was a disaster and so I quickly returned to Claude in order to get a usable AI-generated draft of that chapter. Possibly Le Chat was working beyond its usable context window.

Image by WOMBO Dream.

 34. My edited version of Chapter 3 of "The Sims" is in the January 24th blog post titled "Casanay Vacation". In Chapter 3, Tyhry explains to Diasma her intention to provide the robot with human-like consciousness by transferring a femtozoan from a human test subject to Diasma. Brak and Marda Onway arrive at Casanay for a skiing vacation. Also, Nyrtia is concerned that Anthony might have become too comfortably integrated into Watson family life at Casanay.

 35. The thirty-fifth blog post of January became this blog post, titled "Tyhry on Ice".

 36. The blog post titled "FlashFuture" was written before "Tyhry on Ice", but I intentionally moved it to position #36 for January 2026. I discussed with Claude the changes that I had made in my edited version of Claude's first draft of Chapter 3 and that discussion naturally led to plans for Chapter 4 of "The Sims".

Rather astonished to have made so many blog posts this month, it was useful for me to review all of the blog posts that I have completed so far in January 2026. I'll count the first three blog posts in January as being unrelated to the others and not concerned with creating either "Downgrade" or "The Sims". Posts 4 - 16 were all concerned with creating "Downgrade".  Posts 17 - 20 were concerned with looking back on "Downgrade" and developing a system for putting six LLMs into a virtual discussion group. Blog posts 21 - 36 are all concerned with writing and illustrating "The Sims" which has 25,000 words in the first 3 Chapters.

 January 31st 2026 update. I did not quite complete "The Sims" in January. Today I had Claude generated a first draft of the final chapter of "The Sims" (Chapter 6), but I will not post it on this blog until February.

Next: plans for Chapter 4 of "The Sims". 

Images generated by WOMBO Dream, Grok and Leonardo. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers