{"slug": "ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side", "title": "👻 GhostWriter AI — Stories from the Other Side", "summary": "A developer built GhostWriter AI, a horror story generator that turns a user-supplied premise into an atmospheric tale across five genres: Supernatural, Psychological, Cosmic, Gothic, and Tech Horror. The app uses React and Vite on the frontend with Netlify Functions as a serverless backend that calls the Google Gemini Developer API, keeping the API key in environment variables rather than the browser, and supports story continuation, copy/download, and a Halloween-themed light/dark toggle. The source code is public on GitHub and the project is deployed on Netlify.", "body_md": "This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine\n\nWhat I Built\n\nGhostWriter AI is a horror story generator that turns a simple idea into an atmospheric nightmare.\n\nWhat if the machine you trusted was hiding something? What if an abandoned computer suddenly started communicating with you? Or what if the technology surrounding you knew things it should never know?\n\nI built GhostWriter AI to explore the unsettling boundary between artificial intelligence and horror storytelling. Users provide a story seed, choose a horror genre, select a length, and let AI bring their idea to life.\n\nFeatures include:\n\n👻 Five horror genres: Supernatural, Psychological, Cosmic, Gothic, and Tech Horror.\n\n✍️ Custom story prompts: Turn a simple premise into an original horror story.\n\n📖 Story continuation: Extend an existing story while maintaining continuity.\n\n📋 Copy and download: Keep your generated stories as plain-text files.\n\n🎃 Halloween theme switch: A circular pumpkin toggles between light and dark modes. The pumpkin glows when light mode is active.\n\n🌫️ Atmospheric UI: A haunted-library background, drifting particles, translucent panels, and responsive layouts.\n\nThe goal was to build more than a basic AI wrapper. I wanted the experience itself to feel like entering a mysterious digital manuscript.\n\nDemo\n\n👻 Try GhostWriter AI: [https://ghostwriterai-hectoberfect.netlify.app/](https://ghostwriterai-hectoberfect.netlify.app/)\n\nThe frontend and serverless backend are deployed together on Netlify.\n\nTry this prompt:\n\nA thief breaks into an abandoned smart city to steal its central AI core. At midnight, every locked building announces his full name—even though he has never been there before.\n\nSelect Tech Horror, choose Short, and generate your own nightmare.\n\nCode\n\n🔗 GitHub repository: [https://github.com/Shivam-Sharma2009/GhostWriterAI](https://github.com/Shivam-Sharma2009/GhostWriterAI)\n\nThe project is built with React, Vite, JavaScript, CSS, Netlify Functions, and the Google Gemini Developer API.\n\nThe backend handles AI requests server-side so the API key is not exposed in the browser.\n\nHow I Built It\n\nI built GhostWriter AI using React and Vite for the interface, with Netlify Functions handling the backend requests.\n\nThe application follows this architecture:\n\nReact + Vite → Netlify Functions → Gemini Developer API\n\nHere is how the main pieces work:\n\nFrontend: React manages the story prompt, genre and length selections, manuscript display, loading states, and user feedback.\n\nServerless backend: Netlify Functions validate the input and send the generation request to Gemini.\n\nAI generation: Gemini generates the story according to the supplied premise and selected horror style.\n\nStory continuation: The existing story is passed to the backend so the AI can continue it with new material.\n\nSecure configuration: The API key is stored in Netlify environment variables rather than embedded in frontend code.\n\nDeployment: Netlify hosts the frontend and backend functions, while GitHub stores the source code.\n\nFor this implementation, I used the Gemini Developer API rather than running an open-weight model locally. The surrounding development stack uses open-source tools, but I am not claiming local inference or that Gemini itself is open-source.\n\nWhy Does Open Innovation Matter?\n\nOpen innovation makes it possible for individual developers to experiment, learn from existing tools, and turn ideas into working applications without building every component from scratch.\n\nFor GhostWriter AI, I could focus on the experience—story generation, genre-specific prompts, continuity, and the interface—while relying on established frontend frameworks, serverless infrastructure, and version control.\n\nPublic source code also makes the project easier for other developers to inspect, learn from, improve, and extend.\n\nThere is still room to take this project further: integrating an open-weight language model, adding configurable inference providers, improving rate limiting, and enabling community contributions.\n\nI see this project as a starting point for experimentation, not the end of the journey.\n\nThe Spirit of It\n\nThe scariest part of technology is not always what it can do. Sometimes, it is what we do not understand about it.\n\nsome image are \n\nI wanted GhostWriter AI to capture that feeling: an ordinary prompt becoming a story about a machine, a hidden presence, or something that should not exist.\n\nAnd the small Halloween pumpkin? It is a reminder that even a simple interface detail can make a project feel like its own little world.\n\nEvery story starts with an idea. The machine supplies the nightmare. 🎃\n\nPrize Categories\n\nPrimary submission: Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 4: Ghost in the Machine.\n\nI am not claiming an additional partner prize category without verifying its eligibility requirements.\n\nBuilt with curiosity, code, and a little darkness. 👻\n\nLive demo: [https://ghostwriterai-hectoberfect.netlify.app/](https://ghostwriterai-hectoberfect.netlify.app/)\n\nSource code: [https://github.com/Shivam-Sharma2009/GhostWriterAI](https://github.com/Shivam-Sharma2009/GhostWriterAI)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/shivam-sharma2009/ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side-3epd", "published_at": "2026-10-28 22:36:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-28 22:41:14.261489+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["GhostWriter AI", "Netlify", "Google Gemini Developer API", "React", "Vite", "GitHub", "Shivam Sharma"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ghostwriter-ai-stories-from-the-other-side.jsonld"}}