← Crab

What follows is an edited transcript of two conversations between a writer (J) and an AI assistant (C). It is published as a companion to the short story “Crab” as a demonstration of the process by which the piece was brainstormed, argued over, and written. The conversations have been condensed, with search queries, tooling outputs, and scaffolding removed. Two further changes have been made: the crab’s maker is called Malcolm throughout, and his real home and the locations first chosen near it have been left out, to match the anonymisation in the story.

Unlike most of these stories, this one didn’t start with a research question. It started with something real that already looked like fiction. My friend made a papier-mâché crab and carried it at End of the Road 2026. About a week later, Google’s AI Overview was describing a “Crab Team” of volunteers and puppeteers. The first chat was just curiosity about how that kind of thing happens. The second set out to make a story of it.

Also unlike The Same Fire, the first draft needed a lot of moulding. Most of that was done through dozens of inline comments on the draft. The interesting ones are here; the rest are summarised. Real-life details went in one at a time, and each one changed the plot.

Chat one: How misinformation spreads from small seeds

J: There was only one crab on a stick at End of the Road festival, but Google’s “AI Overview” has extrapolated mentions of it on the internet into a much bigger and more structured phenomenon, with “teams of puppeteers”, supervised by a “Crab Team”.

What a fascinating example of how a mistruth can take hold.

What other textbook examples are there of small seeds becoming widespread beliefs? From the AI era and from earlier history?

[J attaches four screenshots: a photo of the crab above a crowd, and three Google AI answers about it.]

C: That’s a great catch, and a genuinely good name for the phenomenon: a single instance gets processed by an AI that’s optimising for a satisfying, structured-sounding answer, and it fills the gaps with plausible-sounding invented detail. It’s confabulation dressed up as consensus.

From the AI era: citogenesis, where a fake fact is added to Wikipedia, cited by a journalist, and the citation then “confirms” the Wikipedia edit; Google’s 2024 AI Overview blunders, glue on pizza and a small rock a day, both sourced from jokes; and fake legal citations such as Mata v. Avianca, where a lawyer filed a brief full of cases ChatGPT had invented.

From earlier history: the spider-swallowing myth, “invented in 1993 by a columnist, Lisa Holst, specifically to demonstrate how quickly fabricated facts spread”; the Angels of Mons, where Arthur Machen’s clearly labelled short story came back as eyewitness testimony; the Great Moon Hoax of 1835; Napoleon’s height; Piltdown Man; and “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” as a plague rhyme, a 20th-century folk etymology.

The common thread: a small, often joke-sized seed meets an amplifier that is rewarded for sounding confident and complete rather than for being right.

[The Lisa Holst origin story turns out to be doubtful. C corrects it in the second chat.]

J: Another is “Bob Holness played sax on Baker Street”, but let’s try and identify 6 where it was a mischievous hoax that worked too well, and 6 where there was no initial intention to deceive.

C: Mischievous hoaxes that worked too well: the Great Moon Hoax; Piltdown Man; H.L. Mencken’s bathtub hoax, whose invented history kept being cited for decades after he retracted it; the BBC spaghetti tree; the Sokal hoax; the Santilli “alien autopsy” film.

No intent to deceive: “Let them eat cake”; the War of the Worlds panic, much of it inflated by newspapers keen to discredit radio as a rival medium; the Great Wall being visible from space; “we only use 10% of our brains”; “Einstein failed maths”; the Coriolis effect in toilets.

One pattern across both lists: hoaxes tend to get caught, because someone confesses or investigates. Honest errors often don’t, because there’s no single culprit to expose.

J: What was the “great name” you spotted?

C: Good catch. I don’t think I actually gave one. I wrote “a genuinely good name for the phenomenon” and then went straight into describing the mechanism. That was a slip on my part, not a name you missed.

J: Please “alt-text” the screenshots I supplied, so that another chat reading this one can use that information. Repeat text verbatim.

C: [Transcribes the three AI answers word for word. The text appears in section 3 of the story. Describes the photograph as “a large illuminated pink crab puppet with two eyeball antennae on light-up stalks”.]

Chat two: The story

J: [Shares a link to an earlier chat, which C can’t open.]

From these findings, can you sketch out a fictional scenario in which a chain of misunderstandings, confabulations, citogenesis, Chinese whispers from the AI domain into the human rumour mill (forums, WhatsApp, pub conversations) and back and forth, go from one metre-wide papier-mâché crab, to tales of a horde of giant crabs made by the Crab Team, escalating to a perceived alien crab invasion which AI drones are sent to eliminate.

One factor could be a zoom lens shot of the crab over a crowd, perspective foreshortening making it seem as big as the main stage.

For plausibility we could make it a near miss. Maybe this is where the public become aware of the MOD’s drone defence army, as it is deployed in error against a phantom threat.

True background to start with: the crab is papier-mâché, cartoonish, an archetypal red crab (reports of it being pink annoy the creator). Created by Malcolm in his cellar workshop. Mounted on a reused tent pole. Malcolm receives a lot of praise from strangers for his crab at End of the Road Festival 2026. His friends, and strangers, use it as a temporary navigation landmark. It is mentioned in some press reviews (including Uncut). This is all true, you can search for it.

Google’s “AI Overview” confabulated the Crab Team, in real life, as you can see.

Our story will extrapolate fiction from there.

Hit me with some ideas, and sketch out a plot. Perhaps we’ll break it into sections, one for each step of the meme escalating.

C: [Searches for the festival coverage.]

The real material is better than anything I’d have invented.

Gifts from the real world. Uncut’s line about a giant pink crab on a stick that hovered above the crowd gives you the wrong colour, the word “giant” for a one-metre crab, and a verb that makes it sound airborne, all in one sentence. Louder Than War lists papier-mâché crabs on poles, in the plural. That’s the moment one crab becomes several. The festival has form for myths: in 2012 there were claims it was secretly run by Scientology. Peacocks wander the gardens, and peacocks scream at night like something from another world. And the venue is a few miles from Blandford Camp, home of the Royal Signals.

The escalation, in ten steps:

  1. Ground truth. The crab is red. Then Uncut calls it pink, and Malcolm’s quiet war begins. His pedantry is the first seed of the disaster, and the last beat of the story will pay it off.
  2. The plural. An AI Overview does what models do with a plural and a collective noise: it invents a group.
  3. The Team becomes citable. Content farms publish “Who Are The Crab Team?” explainers. Someone adds a sentence to Wikipedia citing one. The Overview now cites Wikipedia, and the loop is closed. In the festival Facebook group, hundreds of people genuinely saw a crab, so every “Crab Team?” post gets “YES the crab!!” Everyone is right about something true, and together they endorse something false.
  4. The corrections make it worse. Each of Malcolm’s posts gets summarised as “a member of the Crab Team addressed speculation about the crabs’ colour.” His denial becomes proof the team exists.
  5. The photo. A telephoto shot flattens the distance so the crab looks as big as the stage. An AI “enhance” filter, which doesn’t know what papier-mâché is, adds carapace texture, joints and extra legs. Someone does trigonometry from the stage height and gets fourteen metres.
  6. The horde. Pubs and WhatsApp. “There were loads of them, they moved between stages.” (True: Malcolm moved between stages.) A TikTok explainer calls it “The Dorset Carcinisation Event”. The campers’ unearthly screaming was the peacocks.
  7. The hovering. Someone asks a chatbot if the crab could be extraterrestrial. It says there’s no confirmed evidence, and the screenshot goes round as “AI won’t deny it.”
  8. The fusion cell. A fictional MOD open-source intelligence system flags a large unidentified object near military sites, with a spread pattern that looks coordinated. It concludes this is either a real incursion or a hostile deception operation, and both call for a response. A human signs off because the dashboard confidence is high.
  9. The near miss. Malcolm announces he’ll photograph the crab at dawn on a hilltop beside a colour calibration card, to settle the colour for good. The system reads this as a forecast of where the object will reappear. The drones arrive, compare what they see with the target profile, and fail on every count: one metre not fourteen, on a pole not hovering, red not pink. They withdraw. Malcolm: “At least they agreed it’s red.”
  10. Carcinisation. The MOD calls it a routine exercise. At End of the Road 2027 there are hundreds of crabs on poles, mostly pink. Final image: Malcolm searches his own name, and the AI Overview tells him he is a former member of the Crab Team.

Shape and voice. Every stage leaves its own kind of artefact, so a found-document structure would suit it: Overview snapshots, a Facebook thread, a TikTok script, the auto-generated threat assessment, and extracts from a dry independent review.

One point on plausibility: keep the drone system’s specifics vague. The comedy and the threat both come from ordinary automation bias. The software is confidently wrong and the human defers to it.

J: Can you read chats from the same group as yourself? Can you see a chat titled “How misinformation spreads…”?

C: Yes, I found it. Two of the historical examples bear directly on the plot.

The Angels of Mons is almost your ending in miniature. Machen’s story was fiction, clearly labelled, and it came back as eyewitness testimony. There’s a pleasing risk that this story does the same once published. A scraper finds it, an AI Overview absorbs it, and “MOD drones deployed against Dorset crab” turns up as fact.

The spider-swallowing myth needs a correction. I said it was invented by a columnist, Lisa Holst, to show how fabricated facts spread. Later investigation couldn’t find that column, so the origin story may itself be made up. It’s a myth about a myth that was supposedly planted to test myths. I should have flagged that at the time.

J: Let’s work this photo into the narrative. Just Malcolm and some strangers messing around with the crab and a festival attraction with moveable letters. He shares the photo with those strangers, it makes it onto the public internet, some piece of AI (auto annotation on an image sharing app?) misconstrues “CRAB ATTACK”.

[J attaches the CRAB ATTACK photograph.]

C: This photo works well as evidence, because almost every problem an image model has is in the same frame.

What a machine sees. A man fighting off a crab with a long pole. Four people recoiling in terror, one crouched on the ground. Above them, in letters a metre tall, the scene is labelled CRAB ATTACK. Everything in that description is accurate except the one thing that matters: they’re pretending. A model can’t tell a performance from a news photo. There’s a real mechanism behind this. Vision models can be fooled by text inside an image; the famous example is an apple with a handwritten “iPod” label being classified as an iPod. This photo is an accidental version of that trick, with the frame captioning itself.

The pole looks like a weapon. Malcolm isn’t carrying the crab, he’s holding it back. The telephoto shot and this one contradict each other, and the rumour mill reconciles them by keeping both: it hovers, and it has to be fended off.

Two photos, two sizes. In this close-up the crab is obviously small. In the telephoto it’s the size of the stage. The forums conclude there are two crabs, a juvenile and an adult. That gives you a life cycle, which gives you breeding, which gives you the horde.

The scattered letters. Discarded letters on the ground can be reconstructed as EVAC. So the attack apparently came with an evacuation order.

The lighting makes it pink. The magenta wash makes this the one photo in which the red crab looks pink, and it’s the one that goes viral.

At the inquiry, the four strangers explain they were pretending. The report records that witnesses said they had been pretending. An AI summary turns that into “witnesses were instructed to say they were pretending,” and the cover-up theory gets its best evidence from the official debunking.

[J moves both chats into a project, and C reads chat one, including the alt text.]

C: The first description, of your photo of the crab over the crowd, calls it an “illuminated pink crab puppet.” So the other chat, looking at the real crab under purple festival lighting, also got the colour wrong. And I can’t check that description against the image. I’m reading a caption of a picture I haven’t seen, which is exactly how the fusion cell works in the story. The system that sends the drones never looks at a single pixel.

The three AI answers read as the escalation happening in real life, before any fiction is added. The first only exaggerates: a “viral sensation”, seen during Pulp and CMAT, which Uncut never said. The second turns it into a tradition, with a 2023 highlights video as evidence, placing the crab three years before it was made. AI Mode creates the institution: volunteers, puppeteers, an anti-commercial philosophy, crowd-surfing.

The AI got the colour right, and that’s a trap. In the middle of all the invention, AI Mode says to meet by the “giant red crab.” It’s the one source in the world that agrees with Malcolm. So he screenshots it and posts it as proof. “Even Google says it’s red.” In doing that, he vouches for the source that invented the Crab Team.

The 2023 video goes into the timeline. The threat assessment dates the first sighting to 2023. The inquiry later finds that the video contains no crabs.

J: Small detail to weave in. Some slight controversy (real life) about the 2026 crab. For the most part, attendees love it. But there is a small contingent, one who approached Malcolm, more online, who take a strong position against flags in festival crowds, obstructing views. To them the crab is equivalent to a flag. Most people love it though, and agree that it’s good as long as not everyone does it. This pays off in our story, when everyone does it.

C: “Fine as long as not everyone does it” is the premise, and the story ends with everyone doing it.

The character. Make the person who approached Malcolm a fictional composite. Call them Dee. Dee isn’t a villain. Dee is polite, has a detailed position on sightlines, and goes home and writes a long, well-argued forum post titled something like “Flags, crabs and the tragedy of the sightline.”

The same sentence reads differently. Uncut’s crab hovered above the crowd at almost every band. To a fan, that’s praise. To Dee, it’s the complaint.

Opponents have a motive to believe in many crabs. A horde makes their case much stronger than a single crab does. The rumour gets help from both directions.

Hyperbole is read as intent. One commenter writes “someone needs to take that crab out,” meaning out of the crowd. A threat-detection pass reads it literally.

The payoff. At End of the Road 2027, both things that made the crab good fail at once. The view is gone: from the middle of the field you see a low, bobbing ceiling of crustaceans. And the landmark is gone too, because every crab looks like every other crab. A possible last scene: Malcolm and Dee end up next to each other at the back, neither able to see the stage. Malcolm slowly lowers the pole. Dee buys him a pint. Somewhere overhead, very high up, something is hovering.

J: Another real life detail. Early in the festival, Malcolm is approached by a steward. He thinks he’s going to be scolded about his crab. But End of the Road is a famously friendly festival with light-touch stewarding. “It’s fine,” says the steward, smiling, “as long as you don’t use it as a weapon.”

C: This is a perfect line to have in real life: a friendly joke that works as a Chekhov’s gun. It sets the one condition on the crab, and the rest of the story is about that condition being broken in every way except the literal one.

[C proposes that Malcolm posts the anecdote that night, and that a summariser later joins it to the CRAB ATTACK photo: “Security staff warned the crab’s handlers against using it as a weapon. Hours later, images showed it being used against festival-goers.”]

J: OK, important detail for readers who were there. There is effectively no internet connectivity at the festival, so Malcolm cannot post that anecdote online during the festival. We can keep it as an offline interaction, but a nice foreshadowing.

C: Useful correction, and it makes the story better. The steward’s line was the only piece of context that could have defused everything, and it never goes online.

That gives the story a clear divide: the humane, funny, contextual version of events exists only in people’s memories, while the version that circulates online is made from fragments with the context removed. The reader knows about the steward from the first pages. No system ever does.

No signal changes other things too. The photo can’t be shared until the drive home. When a phone reconnects, its cloud backup runs automatic tagging before any person has written anything, so the photo’s first caption is written by software. And a site near a military base goes almost silent for four days with fifteen thousand people there, then produces a burst of imagery containing unidentified objects and the word ATTACK. To a system without local knowledge, that looks like a communications blackout followed by a flood of reports. A junior analyst could almost catch it: “Isn’t that just because festivals don’t have signal?”

J: In real life we swapped numbers and WhatsApped the photo to the strangers once we were back in civilisation. But if it helps the plot we can also share it with AirDrop. Whatever serves the plot best.

C: Stick with WhatsApp, and add AirDrop only for one extra copy. WhatsApp strips location data and ends up labelled “Forwarded many times”, which is almost a visual shorthand for the whole story. An unknown bystander could receive the full, geotagged original by AirDrop, and that’s the copy the machines read. The inquiry never finds the bystander, which gives conspiracy theorists a genuine unknown in the middle of a debunking.

J: OK. Any questions before trying a first draft? We are talking short story, perhaps 12 to 20 pages. The pub scene could be dialogue driven. Everything past tense I guess. Otherwise my idea of tone is something like magazine journalism or popular non-fiction, with an omniscient narrator.

C: Three choices would shape the draft most.

  1. Documents: quoted in the narrative, as separate interludes, or mostly quoted with two or three set-piece interludes?
  2. Names: real names for the true background and invented names after that, invent everything, or real names throughout?
  3. Ending: the steward’s line under the 2027 horde, Malcolm and Dee at the back of the field, the AI Overview calling Malcolm a Crab Team member, or all three?

J: Mostly quoted, with two or three set-piece interludes. Real names for the true background, invented names after the story turns to fiction. All three endings together.

C: [Writes “Carcinisation: How one papier-mâché crab became an invasion”, eleven sections and an afterword, approximately 6,500 words. The three interludes are the real AI answers, the HALYARD threat assessment, and extracts from the independent review.]

Moulding

The rest of the chat was mostly me leaving comments on passages of the draft. A selection follows.

J (on the title and subtitle): Title: Crab. No subtitle.

J (on “Someone had spelled CRAB ATTACK BU, with the rest of the last word lost at the far end of the frame”): It actually said “THE CUM BEAR” and Malcolm, along with the strangers who volunteered themselves, amended it to “CRAB ATTACK”. “BU” is a remnant. Let’s not keep “CUM BEAR” but amend the story. Even omit the “BU” detail.

C: [Rewrites the scene so that Malcolm and the strangers rehang the letters themselves. In the pub, the table’s guesses at what BU stood for are replaced.]

The pub keeps the beat where the one correct guess is dismissed as boring. Gaz now says they put the sign up themselves for the photo, which is exactly what happened. It also adds an irony without any further edits: the HALYARD assessment lists CRAB ATTACK as “onsite signage”, when the people in the photo wrote it.

J (on the AirDrop bystander): Let it all go by AirDrop, it saves words.

J (on the same passage, a moment later): Forget the AirDrop, it serves no purpose.

C: [Removes the bystander. The geotagged original now reaches the machines through Malcolm’s own phone backup.]

One side effect is that the unidentified-bystander mystery has gone from the review. In its place, the file that set HALYARD off turns out to be Malcolm’s own.

[J asks for the hilltop scene to be moved nearer to Malcolm’s real home. C chooses a hill with a centuries-old sea mark and a Napoleonic Admiralty signal station, overlooking a naval base, so that the crab, itself a landmark, is photographed beside a real one. The details are omitted here, because the scene moved again when the story was anonymised.]

J (on the drones’ arrival): Let’s describe these drones, as Malcolm and friends see them. They are markedly not like civilian drones. Bearing real weaponry. Big. Threatening. Coordinated as a flock.

C: [Expands the arrival to four paragraphs: a thrum felt in the chest; each drone the size of a small car, with something slung underneath that clearly isn’t a camera; the formation splitting without any signal; a dog pressing against its owner’s legs.]

I kept the weapons unnamed, since nobody there could say what they were, and that’s more menacing.

J (on “rocking very slightly in the wind as if they were breathing in time”): stock still despite the gusty wind

J (on the pub scene’s claim to have been “reconstructed for this article from the memories of three of the four people there”): We can drop the journalistic pretence, just for this section. So just set the scene, no need to explain how it’s sourced.

J: OK, on my friend’s request, please anonymise. Give him a new name, move him somewhere else, but keep the vibe: coastal, some distance from the festival, plausible for MoD detection.

C: [Searches for Maker Church and its signal station.]

He is now Malcolm, and he lives in Cawsand, on the Cornish side of Plymouth Sound. The photo shoot moves to Maker Heights, the high ground above the village. It keeps the historical echo. Maker Church’s tower has long been a landmark for sailors, and during the Napoleonic Wars it was an Admiralty signal station.

MoD detection is more plausible than before. Devonport naval base is a couple of miles away across the water, and the HALYARD log now names it. The drones come in from the north-east across the Sound. The dog walkers are from Millbrook. HALYARD’s base becomes “a site in the south-west”, since it has to cover both the festival and Plymouth.

J: Would you really take a ferry from Cawsand? We don’t have to keep the ferry element.

C: You might, in fact. The Torpoint chain ferry is a normal way to head east, and the alternative is a detour north to the Tamar Bridge. But only a local would appreciate the detail. I’ve dropped it. The line now reads “On the long drive east he had rehearsed…”

J (on the whole of section 1): This whole section can go first person. The narrator is Malcolm’s friend and companion at the festival.

C: [Rewrites section 1 in the first person. The narrator now takes the CRAB ATTACK photo on Malcolm’s phone, which keeps the original on his phone for the backup thread.]

J (on the opening): Start with “I first met Malcolm’s crab when I rendezvoused with him at the End of the Road festival campsite in September 2026. It was definitely red.”

[Later, J asks whether “rendezvoused” is spelled right. It is, but it looks odd on the page. J wants a word that says he arrived to camp with Malcolm, and it becomes “joined”.]

J (on “a red crab held a metre above the crowd is the best meeting point ever devised”): Couple of niggles. It’s not the best meeting point ever devised, because it moves. So don’t say so. Better to say nothing. However people do use it as an imperfect navigation aid. And 15k people won’t all be at the same stage.

C: [Rewrites: “It moved, of course, so it was no good as a fixed meeting point, but ‘look for the crab’ usually got you to the right part of the crowd.”]

To keep the 2027 ending consistent, I changed its callback from “meet by the crab” to “look for the crab”. I left Google’s “meet by the giant red crab” alone, since that’s the AI’s own wording.

J (on “I kept quiet, because I had spent a good part of the weekend standing behind the crab and suspected Dee had a point. Over the weekend, most people who were asked about the crab landed on the same position”): Drop the first sentence. Second sentence, “landed on the same position, which is also mine:”

J: You’ve picked up Pulp which is authentic, but no other acts, which is conspicuous. Instead of being try-hard and namedropping lots of acts, let’s drop the specificity of naming Pulp.

C: [Removes Pulp from the narrator’s voice in three places.]

Pulp and CMAT are still named once, inside the quoted AI Overview. That’s the real text you captured, and it has a job in the story: the AI invents the detail that the crab was seen during the headliners’ sets.

J: I think we can keep the pub reference.

J: Add an introduction at the top, in italics, explaining that sections 1–3 are all true. Only Malcolm’s name and home have been changed. Section 3’s extracts are real and verbatim.

C: [Adds the introduction.]

Before you rely on it, some of what I wrote in those sections is invented. In section 1, the “review that later took this person’s evidence” belongs to the fictional inquiry. In section 2, the forwarding chain, the “Forwarded many times” labels, the automatic caption and tags, Malcolm’s correction post, and Dee’s forum post are all mine. In section 3, the extracts are abridged, the video line is my summary of a thumbnail, and the italic notes are narration. And I’ve never seen the screenshots. I worked from the other chat’s description, which said the text was verbatim, but I can’t check that myself.

J: Change “true” to “substantially true”, I think that’s enough. Lose “and reproduced verbatim”.

[Shortly afterwards, J narrows the introduction further, to “Section 1 and most of section 2 are substantially true.”]

Smaller comments tightened the prose throughout: “most rural festivals” became “many”, an explanation of where Cawsand is went, as did “near Blandford Forum”, and the torch on the pole gained “spectacular shadows on ceilings”. After the chat, I added the links to the Uncut and Louder Than War reviews, and the photographs, anonymised by asking ChatGPT to give everyone in them a new face.

The story was written, anonymised, and published on 15 September 2026, the same day as the drafting chat.

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