Cracking Open Creativity with ChatGPT
I asked ChatGPT to help me reimagine Humpty Dumpty — and one of the King’s horses had a lot to say.
Hello, fellow explorers,
I’ll be honest right from the start: I don’t know everything about AI. In fact, I don’t even know most things about AI. But what I do know is that curiosity counts for a lot, and that’s the spirit I’m bringing into this newsletter. I want to see how these new tools can stretch our creativity, and I’d like to invite you to learn alongside me.
The tool we’re starting with is probably the one you’ve already heard about: ChatGPT. You can try it free at chat.openai.com, and if you feel ambitious there’s a paid version that costs $20/month. The free version is still plenty for today. My aim here isn’t to turn you into a prompt engineer — it’s to show you how playful and surprising AI can be when you treat it as a creative partner.
🥚 Humpty Dumpty Revisited
To test this out, let’s start not with cutting-edge science or business strategy, but with something much older: a nursery rhyme.
Do you remember Humpty Dumpty? He’s usually drawn as an egg who sat on a wall, had a great fall, and could never be put back together again. The funny thing is — the original 1797 version doesn’t even mention an egg. That image came later, when people treated the rhyme as a riddle. The “answer” was an egg, because once an egg falls, there’s no repairing it.
Here’s the earliest known printed version, from 1797:
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Four-score men and four-score more,
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.”
Notice anything missing? No King’s men, no horses — just “four-score men and four-score more.” The now-familiar lines about the King’s horses and men were added in later 19th-century versions, and that’s the form that stuck in our cultural memory.
Which makes me wonder: how did horses even get mixed up in this story in the first place?
🐴 A Horse’s-Eye View
So let’s ask the obvious question: what on earth were the King’s horses doing there? Horses are magnificent creatures, but I’ve never seen one wield glue or tweezers.
That curiosity led me to try something simple: I asked ChatGPT to retell the Humpty Dumpty story from the perspective of one of the King’s horses. Here’s a taste of what came back:
I am a war horse. My hooves are made for thunder, my muscles for the charge. I’ve carried knights into battle and wagons through mud. But this? This was different.
They led me to the wall, pointed at the wreckage, and cried, “Help us put him back together!” And there it was — an egg. They wanted me, a horse, to fix an egg.
I tried nudging with my nose, careful as I could be, but every shell only splintered thinner. The men groaned, the King frowned, and I wondered: perhaps this is not a horse’s work at all. Perhaps some things are not meant to be restored, but re-imagined.
That’s the magic of these experiments: take something familiar, twist the perspective, and suddenly you’ve got humor, absurdity, and a dash of reflection.
🧩 Try It Yourself
Now it’s your turn. Open up ChatGPT (the free version is fine) and play with Humpty Dumpty from a fresh angle. Here are a few prompts to get you started:
“Retell Humpty Dumpty from the point of view of the wall.”
“Write Humpty Dumpty as a Shakespearean tragedy.”
“What if Humpty Dumpty were a spaceship captain instead of an egg?”
“Explain why the King’s men kept calling the horses for help.”
See what kind of stories come back — some might be silly, some surprisingly thoughtful. Either way, it’s a great way to practice using AI as a creativity partner: you give it the spark, it gives you back something unexpected.
If you try one you like, post it in the comments and share it with me — I’d love to see the best “alternative Humptys” you uncover.
🌱 Cracks and New Beginnings
The more I think about it, the more Humpty Dumpty feels like a metaphor for where we are with AI. Something has cracked open, and there’s no way to put the world back exactly as it was before. The King’s men can’t restore the old order, and maybe that’s not the point anyway.
Eggs don’t exist just to sit on walls. They’re meant to crack, to spill open, to become something new. In the same way, AI isn’t here to glue the past together — it’s here to hatch possibilities we haven’t seen yet.
That’s both strange and a little unsettling, but it’s also exciting. Creativity thrives in the moment after the shell breaks. And maybe that’s our real task: not to mourn what’s broken, but to explore what can grow from the pieces.
So let’s keep exploring. Together.