I Should Have Believed Her

She said this is what she does for a living.

When I posted my last cap, LtSL: Scents, I initially forgot to add it to my Caps page.  It was only weeks later when I finally added it to that list that I realized it was the first cap I'd done all year.  In September!  I told myself at that point that I'd be sure to make at least a couple other caps this year as having only one for an entire year seems just lazy.  

So this past weekend when I saw this image on tumblr, I saved it back to see if I could make a cap out of it.  The idea I had when saving it was a guy getting transformed by his neighbor after she tells him specifically what she does and he doesn't believe it.  

Fast forward to this morning and I'm feeling pretty good, so i decide to give it a go.  I write and write and write and quickly realize I'm way overshooting the space this image is giving me for text.  But as it's been awhile since I wrote a quick cap/story/tumblr/obscura like this and I was really enjoying where the story was going, I decided to just let it flow to wherever it flowed.  

To be honest, I really liked the story.  There was NO way it was going to fit into a cap.  Even if I used very small text and even if I utilized both sides of this image for text boxes, it was just too damned long.  Not wanting to give up on it, I went ahead and posted the full text as a tumblr post which you can read here.  

My next thought was to see if I could shorten it down to cap length.  Maybe if it was 1/3 of that size I could use one half of the space on this image, crop it in, and make a good cap.  

Now, a quick aside, I recently got a new cell phone.  A Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold.  It wasn't one of the reasons I bought it, but it came with a free year of Google's Gemini Pro AI service.  While I'm no fan of AI in general, I can't deny it's becoming a major tech piece of our society.  Between Microsoft offering me CoPilot on Windows and every Office application I use, Adobe pushing me to 'AI' my PDFs or enhance my Photoshop work with their AI, and Google pimping Gemini  at every turn, I figure there are a lot of people out there using these features and I need to at least be aware of them to keep up with society. 

So, now that I have the full version of Google's latest AI, why not try it out on this story.  I brought up Gemini and asked it if it could shorten a story down to 1/3 its size without losing out on any major details.  It of course said yes and I gave it a try.  

Lemme tell you it both worked and failed at the same time.  It failed because it took a story clearly written in the first person and 'summarized' it.  As I didn't have a name for the character before changing it to Pricilla, Google just referred to it as 'The subject'.  As in 'The subject met Lisa and fell into a sexual relationship with her...'.  That was clearly not going to work.  At the same time, it did a good job of narrowing down the story.  Glossing over some of the details, combining issues into one sentence, and just shortening it all down to roughly 1/3 its original size.  

So, I put it's version on one side of my screen and opened up a new Word document and got to re-writing it in my own voice.  So what you see here in this cap is my version of it's shortening of my original story.  

Am I happy with it?  Well, no.  I like all the squirmy details that got left on the cutting room floor from the original.  But that being said, I think the AI did a fine job of giving me a good outline to work from and the result here is 'fine'.  I put it into a simple design, had a bit of fun 'hiding' the title and my watermark behind the image, and here we are!

If you have the time to read both versions, the cap and the tumblr version, I'd love to hear what you think of the shortening.  Did it do a good job?  Did it feel like it was missing anything before you read the full version?  Did it feel like AI had a hand in it?