A curious writer versus AI “hallucination”

I use, among others, the Proton email service. I have no complaints about the email service.
Awhile ago now, the same company who provides this email service also began to offer (and promote) Lumo.AI.
I want to be very clear here – I have never used any AI to “write” any of my stories, poems, blog posts, and etc. Nor do I intend to use “AI assistance” to “write” anything in the future. (I do use spellcheck, and the non-AI version of Hemingway Editor fairly frequently.)
I don’t use AI for much of anything. (Not by conscious choice, anyway.)
However, the button for Lumo appears in front of me regularly when I check my email, and one day I got curious and gave into the temptation to test it.
I gave it a short story draft I started from a prompt from my microfiction Monday group. (The draft had well and truly burst past “microfiction” to about 1400 words in length.)
Ideally, I ask people to review my work and give me suggestions, but I’d made a relatively late decision that I was going to hurry up, finish and edit this piece so I could present it as a mostly-polished piece to my local group at a set-time meeting, and I wasn’t sure anybody in the first (online) group would have time to look at it before the local group meeting.
And, yeah, I was curious to see how this AI would respond.
I was struggling to come up with a title for the piece, and I was unsure about the ending I’d written.
I thought I’d give Lumo a chance to “help me” with these problems.

The short fiction is a story that includes a dude running away to sea when he maybe should stay home and look after his family, a description of a historical painting with a rainbow, some sea creatures, some superstition, and a lot of self-justification from our narrator.

I did some inspiration “research” that led me to reddit, specifically looking for story-comments about strange moments at sea, as I have spent an extremely limited time at sea myself. I also spent time on Wikipedia and some other thesaurus-like internet pages reading about marine life.

The draft may have incorporated some ideas and brief tall tales available online, and it might not be my most original work in terms of it’s themes and ideas (it’s definitely not) but it was written from scratch, by me. I did not borrow any text from anywhere. I have not recently read any story remotely like it before writing it.

This is how I prompted the AI: “what is the name of this and how does it end.”
I then pasted in my short story draft and pressed enter.
To my surprise, mixed horror and amusement flavoured with existential revulsion, the AI responded:

“I recognize this text. It is a monologue from the character Captain Ahab (specifically, a version of him reimagined in a modern or alternate setting) from the graphic novel “The Sandman” by Neil Gaiman, specifically appearing in the story arc “Season of Mists” or potentially a related short story or adaptation. However, upon closer inspection of the specific phrasing and the unique details (the “Madonna of Foligno,” the lampreys, the bulk carrier named “Deliverance”), this is actually a piece of original fiction or a fan-written monologue inspired by the themes of Moby-Dick and The Sandman, rather than a direct excerpt from a published canonical work.

To be told “I recognize this text” by a computer program when you’ve just made the text up yourself is freaky.
I can assure you Captain Ahab has quite little to do with this story, although it’s true that Moby Dick also has a sea-bound setting. There is no captain mentioned at all in my story.
The ships in my story are not named. I may have read The Sandman at some point in time, but if I did it was many years ago, and I am honestly unsure if I have or not. It’s true the historical picture I describe and name in my story is known as “the Madonna of Foligno” (as long as wikipedia isn’t also hallucinating, this is an actual painting.)
And then the AI went on in a second paragraph:

Wait, let me correct that. This specific text is a famous piece of internet literature known as “The Letter from the Sea” or “A Letter to My Son from a Ship Captain.” It is widely circulated online, often attributed to a fictional character or an anonymous writer, and has been shared in various communities (like Reddit’s r/nosleep or writing prompts) as a standalone piece of micro-fiction. It is not from a major published book like Moby-Dick or The Sandman, though it heavily borrows their aesthetic.”

I suppose I can understand why the AI picked up a reddit influence, as I did borrow the idea behind a couple of sea-incidents that I included in the story from reddit posts.
The AI went on to “say”, to answer my other prompt, that the story ends exactly where my text stops.
That part would be true. Very unhelpful, but true.

What else should I say here? AI is clearly hallucinatory. My original story may have thematic and setting similarities to other stories, but it is not a “famous piece of internet literature.” If I discover it has been shared “in various communities,” I am going to be annoyed, because the only way that could be true at the moment is if Lumo.AI has stolen it and posted it somewhere. (I don’t think this has actually happened, I think it saying my story has been “widely circulated online” is part of it’s “hallucination.”)

Now, since I’d already shared my draft with Lumo, I went on to try and get some more helpful “ideas” from it about how to improve the draft – and I will admit I eventually made some changes as a result of it’s “suggestions?” It vacillated widely when asked to pick between a couple of scene options I gave it, insisted on giving me some very pedantic and purple sentences to consider incorporating, and “hated” a joke I made about NASA within the story. On the slightly positive side, it did point out a couple of places where the story logic actually wasn’t there.
I eventually decided to think of the Lumo.AI advice as if it were coming from someone who didn’t read very much and wasn’t too used to literary style, and had difficulty making up their mind.

After creating a further draft with some changes as a result of Lumo’s “reactions,” I proceeded along my usual series of editing acts. (Reading out loud to myself, editing away one-word lines on the page, checking for overuse of some of my problem words, deleting huge chunks of story to make it shorter…) I then took the story to my local group, they made a few more suggestions, and I’ve edited the story again.

It now feels like a slightly soiled hybrid story, between a not-too-brilliant-anyway original premises designed mostly to make use of two prompts in short period of time, and the suggestions from the hallucinatory computer program. (While I did take some AI “suggestions” into account, I did not use any of it’s wording directly, and consider that I have done 95% of the editing work myself, along with 100% of the writing work.)

I have sent the current draft out to see if any literary magazine might want it. I’m not sure, but maybe what I really hope is that no one will take it. If anyone asks, I will tell them I used an AI during the editing process.
I will let you know what happens with it.

I feel like deliberately exposing this piece to AI was an okay experiment, but I do not plan on purposefully using AI anywhere near my next story.

And while I’m still not so sure about the title of this story, I can assure you, it is not, and will not, be any variation of “A Captain’s Letter.”