Show HN: Create a Children's book with AI – with illustrations (childbook.ai)
Hey together with wife we took part in AssemblyAI hackathon and although we didn't win we felt good enough about our inital MVP that we took it a bit further.
You can describe your characters and give a title and however long/detailed description you want, the gpt-3 will generate a children's story from it, dall-e will generate images. Images are postprocessed with stable-diffusion custom model (for stylisation) and that's the final result.
It's still early as it was done in about 2 weeks, but I count on your feedback.
I am software engineer and did basically all of the engineering work myself.
Feel free to ask question regarding implementation plans, etc. cannot wait to learn what you think. I'll appriciate any feedback.
16 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadMaybe show a short preview page/chapter for free, based on the real character and prompt? Hard to pay for something when you have no idea what you're getting, or the quality of it.
Other than that, the process was pretty straightforward and simple! Minor quibble: Maybe make the form fields clearer, like what they influence (is the title important?), and which are optional or vs required. The gender/age/hair color etc. had dark grey backgrounds for me and I wasn't sure what that meant.
At the bottom of landing page there are examples: https://www.childbook.ai/book/clbxjxxjp0000mq08xtavb4b9
If you still have the link, I've moved forward the book for you
Some more feedback:
1) I don't know if this is possible, but can you ask the upstream generators to try to maintain a consistent image style between pages? The different look and feel page to page can be a little jarring
2) Similarly, I don't suppose there's a way to keep the look of each character consistent through the story? It's not always clear who's who, from page to page. The examples have a single character, and it's able to maintain the same hair and clothing style, but with multiple characters it's hard to keep track of who's who.
3) An on-page "regenerate image" (perhaps with an additional prompt?) might be helpful to further fix up some of the trippier images
4) Can the payment model accommodate longer stories? Like if I wanted to pay more for a 50-page book with more details and dialogue, etc.?
Overall though, this is a great synthesis of upstream AI producers and I'm excited to see how it develops! A book like this might make a fun gift for some of the kids in my life... thanks for the demo :)
2) Character consistency is a much harder topic but we have couple of ideas, either dreambooth for each combination of hair/age/color etc. and or layering and rendering one character at a time then layering them over an image should give much more stable characters.
3) Regenerate - we were thinkin on a button for the whole book, so that you can regenerate it if it's not to your liking up to N times. With illustrations we were thinking to first add 3-4 versions of your illustrations that you can review and set which is best and as a next step regeneration.
4) Current payment model was just a test if anyone would be willing to pay for the book. We were thinking subscription and N chapters per tier, so that you can generate like a 100 chapters a week. And how you want to spend it it's your choice.
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I work full-time so this is side-project done in two weeks, it's far from what it could be but I am still happy that I've got something working and at least someone finds enjoyable.
I wrote a really good, eh.. I was given a good story from ai that would be a great children's book but I couldn't find any decent ways to self-publish.
The pay what you want seems cool.
I have a story like but needs images. I think that's the value add.
Also I have added small info paragraph before title and description so it's more clear what it does.
Also here is a link to youtube video of the app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXuzWrOhBPk