Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney (adventure-of-penelope.vercel.app)
Two of my friends recently welcomed their first child and I "wrote" a kid's book for them using ChatGPT for the story and Midjourney for illustrations.
The plot was sourced from a group of friends.
414 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadWe'll be launching a web and real time voice changer soon too, so you can use your own emotion and turn it into another voice. Or make it sing.
Edit: Clarifications.
1. https://magicstory.ai
Right now the workflow is mostly automated, but we still manually approve stories before they get sent out to ensure quality. Unfortunately bc of manual time it takes + GPU costs + super high demand we will probably start offering a paid tier. Hope that helps!
By the way, if I may ask: since story generation seems to be free, what is your business model?
Re: pricing bc of the manual time it takes to approve stories + GPU costs + super large queue we actually just started offering a paid tier to move up the queue and get your story within 24 hours. Definitely still experimenting tho!
Another thing. Don't you have a bad feeling uploading images of your kids, conveniently tagged with their age, to a random web service that promises to delete the images without even revealing the makers?
I mean yes, it looks legitimate and you can find a person on Twitter who seems to be the maker of it, but that's not a guarantee for the safety of the uploaded images. I'm not a data paranoid, but careless sharing my kids' images with a random service like that crosses a border.
They are all very bland, and sound like someone is making a summary of the story rather than reading the story itself.
So I think it's great to get ideas of a plot for a story, but then you should write it yourself to make it more "lively".
I used to worry about that... but then someone pointed out to me that there are pretty much no stories of anyone being hurt by that.
Worst case, those images leak all over the web... And then what? The internet is already filled with pictures of people and children, yours won't stand out. The photos aren't tagged by name, and even if they were, few people care about obama as a 5 year old pirate [1], so why would they care about your child?
Overall, the risk of personal harm from a data leak seems really small - so I put my efforts elsewhere, like making sure my child gets to spend more time with me - that's infinitely more valuable.
[1]: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/ter...
Also planning to have stock characters so you can make stories without uploading images since I get that's definitely a concern for most parents. Would love any other feedback on how to improve the experience!
But having a binary only option for this forces non binary children to comply to the gender dichotomy while having an option outside this norm allows them the freedom of choice.
Also, ask yourself why a binary-only option doesn't strike you as "advocating sex change" when the users are capable of choosing different options.
When did you get the idea? ChatGPT is what sparked it for me.
Edit: typo
From the perspective of anyone going into AI, that makes children the perfect target for the mass produced blended garbage that AI generates.
Interesting stories have a set up and when you think you know what's going on, they switch, otherwise it's not a story, just narration.
The trick is those bait and switch differ culturally, depending on language of the reader, even the tastes of the reader, otherwise you don't get that "I was NOT expecting that" joy.
This is a serious question.
> The first we realised there was something wrong with granddad was when he stripped naked and covered his body in butter. After that he went downhill very quickly.
Though I think the overall response was mixed.
EDIT: coincidentally enough, both share a character with the same name, "sparkles". All of these GPT generated plots have the same formulaic tone to them.
100% relevant: "Someday" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)> by Isaac Asimov, 1956
But the point is that these are basically paying humans to churn out low-quality cookie cutter stories in a time frame and compensation rate that hardly permits for any real creativity. This is an obvious example for something GPT can do well, but that's just automating garbage production.
Automating Terry Pratchett on the other hand is impossible without "genuine" creativity: his stories work not just because of the technicalities (a fleshed-out world with consistent rules and characters) but also because he had "something to say". He had personal and political views, experiences and opinions that influenced his work and world building.
In essence, works like OP's and the similar ones others have linked here remind me of Hayao Miyazaki's infamous reaction to machine learning driven animation[1]: it's an insult to life itself. It's a soulless approximation of the trappings of art that doesn't understand what it supposedly attempts to capture and can say nothing about it because it doesn't have an opinion on it.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EvnKYOuvWo (tech demo and reaction starts at 1:25)
I can foresee a very near future where this market is absolutely overrun with auto generated books + artwork. I don't think of this as a good or bad thing. It's just going to be interesting to see who gets the first jump on this.
Good authors+illustrators for children are just so far ahead of any AI generated content right now it’s not even comparable. Something as seemingly simple as Julia Donaldson’s Smartest Giant in Town is a heart warming tale, told along a continuous theme with a consistent voice where the story wraps up beautifully at the end. Then it’s all brought together with delightful illustrations that match and delight so well. They aren’t just good illustrations. They are delightful. Heck. They even have Easter eggs of sorts. All of that gave my son and I so much to discuss, point at, draw, and sing together. Wouldn’t want any child who could have that experience to miss out on it.
Whether having to sift through massive amount of trash to get anything created with some quality is a good or a bad thing... decide for yourself.
With AI you can improve the quality of the writing, tweak the style of delivery, add detail to story lines, and deliver stories faster.
I like the idea of using it partially to help complement some effort that you've done yourself, but the idea that you're using both an LLM to produce the story and a diffusion model to produce the pictures makes the entire piece of work almost devoid of individual effort.
Using them to produce a private story for your own child is a noble enough effort, but I'm seeing lots of comments on wanting to get these types of things published. With the explosion of these vanity press level dime novel tabloid literary works, it will be that much more difficult to sift out the wheat from the chaff.
1. Entire classes of skilled jobs are eliminated, only the most elite writers and artists can make money
2. Value for story creation gets concentrated in the few companies that own and operate the best LLM's and best stable diffusion models
3. Society becomes more fragmented because we are all watching different content
These are just a few I'm able to think of in 2 minutes.
It's a common mistake to assume all technological progress is an unadulterated good. Just look at all the unanticipated negatives that came out of the computer revolution, like every technological revolution before it.
If one considers how inefficient humans are (daily consumption, heating, transport..etc) and how in comparison computers are extremely efficient (once they have been built), you realise where "pure" progress will take us.
Ephemeralization is the term Buckmeister-Fuller used.
It's not the first time that 'entire classes of skilled jobs' have been eliminated. It's the natural side effect of automation and has happened with every generation of new products. Industry automation might have taken millions of jobs away so far to give us better products faster. Tomorrow my job as a usual developer might be gone to these AI tools (though it's a far fetched thought), and I have to be prepared for it, and re-skill/up-skill myself if I ever sense that day is about to arrive.
> I typed a series of prompts to ChatGPT to get it to write me a story with the following plot:
> Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
He mentions elsewhere that generating the images was a lot of work.
So basically he and his friends had an oddball premise for a story, and with some non-trivial amount of labor, he produced a story which was far from the worst thing I've read on HN.
It was actually pretty clever for a kids' story and the illustrations were good. The finished product was better than the prompt. Somehow the process produced a fairy, a plot twist and slabs of butter riding a roller coaster.
Where's the crisis here? A person came up with an idea and used a tool to generate a work product from it. Without that tool he would have needed to hire a professional illustrator and maybe a writer. I bet this took a fair bit of work to do right. But the technology enabled a creative work that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
I have no doubt there will be tons of crappy spam enabled by ChatGPT too, but frankly this little story wasn't it, it was humorous and I doubt it was a trivial endeavor.
Per authors comments above, it was indeed a trivial endeavor: a few hours to tweak the prompts and a few hours to make the site.
Compare to the most basic children’s book, which would take at least 10 hours to illustrate for a professional (10 picture times one hour per picture).
Are you afraid of Roko's Basilisk?
For those that are increasingly happy to live in, and raise their children in, that fake and simplistic environment, I suppose it's their call. But reading/watching/living in that simpler, dumber environment can't be good for our intellect and higher abilities.
Have you looked into even basic neuroscience research or perhaps at least personally known someone with, for example, dementia? It would perhaps teach you something about what the mind is and isn't and what we know and don't know and how perhaps AIs might fit in this story.
Just handwaving because it's "just statistics" is not useful.
As for the environment - well, I have my opinion on social media and online content and even most print content and most books. Will AI make that worse? Yes. But it's already bad enough that this is not a meaningful change. The good stuff has always been accessible and for a long time.
Google, once upon a time, solved a similar problem. With all the information on the internet, how do you find the good stuff? The relevant stuff? I don't think it does this job at the moment - and perhaps flooding the world with content will create the conditions for the next major disruptor to create something that actually works rather than this ad-bloated nonsense we have now.
It already takes a ton of my time seeking out books and other media that align with what I want. Humans have done a spectacular job of creating stuff that's minimally acceptable to make a sale. AI isn't creating the problem you're talking about, even if it is making it worse.
Perhaps it will become bad enough that it becomes worthwhile to fix.
This was effectively the situation with the internet when the Goog came in and wrecked everyone's cash cow - because it was valuable enough to take the hit and prospect for future value to undermine the status quo.
I see two ways to break the current stalemate:
- Some 'new google' comes by and does to google what google did to Yahoo et al.
- Somebody creates a system that does the same job, but distributed. You control your recommendation algorithm, so you can prune it as you want.
I really really want the second one, but I haven't yet figured out how one would get the necessary data. There's a bootstrapping problem here - in order for recommendation algorithms to work, you need a ton of folks creating data for them. In order to get those folks, you would need to have a good enough recommendation algorithm to attract them.
I'm wondering now, though, if data on user preferences is for sale somewhere. Like, if I wanted to bootstrap such a system, is there some adtech business somewhere that has information on what books / music / etc people like, and how much would it cost to get that in there?
But now, of course, because you're looking at spending a bunch of money to bootstrap - you're hobbled by the need to be profitable to make that back. Stuck in Trapitalism.
Books were expensive and locked away in monasteries for quite a while. Church being scared of "reading" being spread as a technology.
Steam-powered trains were feared because of their speed. Cars... Planes... Etc
Television the drug of a nation... Now its the Internet. I'm sure radio was just as addictive and hated by parents as television.
Agree also that we'll have a lot more chaff but the chaff began the day our ancestors chiseled the first symbols into rock and gave us writing.
Yes, better tools for making art means more art will be generated, and lowering the bar means less talented people might start making up the bulk of the new art that is generated, but new mediums inevitably spark creativity in a handful of emerging artists, and that enables them to create masterpieces that could not have been created before.
"And worse is yet to come. Today, as the secret spreads, many more are hurrying to tie up with Mr Knipe. And all the time the screw turns tighter for those who hesitate to sign their names.
This very moment, as I sit here listening to the howling of my nine starving children in the other room, I can feel my own hand creeping closer and closer to that golden contract that lies over on the other side of the desk.
Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve"
1. https://storypanda.ai
"Once upon a time there was a mouse called Miisa. One day she was driving through the woods and she saw a beautiful castle in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t go in but wanted to. Then she saw a door which said “The Secret Passage.” She went inside and met the owner who was the witch of the woods. “I’ve been lonely for a while and would like to live with you” said Miisa. The witch agreed. “But there’s one condition,” she said. “No matter how many times I ask you to do something, you must do it.” Then the witch asked Miisa to put a hat on her, which would make her invisible. Miisa was terrified. But she did it any way. Then the witch asked Miisa to kill a mouse which lives in her home. The witch wanted to have the mouse’s blood. “I can’t do that,” Miisa said. “I hate mice.” “Well,” said the witch. “You can’t kill a living thing. So then you must torture a living thing.” Miisa was getting scared but then a thought came into her head. She asked the witch, “Does this mean that I can torture a mouse?” The witch didn’t say anything, so Miisa said that she didn’t want to do it and started to leave the castle. The witch was so sad that she threw a fireball to stop Miisa. And that was that."
Well, as weird as this is, it's totally original and creative.
Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a king named Maximus. He was a kind and fair ruler, but he was also very demanding. He wanted to make sure that all of the subjects in his kingdom were happy and well taken care of, but he didn't always know how to do that.
One day, King Maximus decided to hold a contest to see who could come up with the best idea for improving the lives of the people in his kingdom. He announced the contest to all of the people in the land, and many of them started thinking of ideas right away.
One young girl named Emma was struggling to come up with an idea. She didn't know what to do, and she was starting to feel discouraged.
Then, a girl dragon named Supreet came to her and said, "Emma, I have an idea for how we can make sure that everyone in the kingdom has enough food to eat. We can divide the food into smaller pieces and give some to each person. This way, everyone will have enough to eat, and there will be no waste."
Emma was very impressed with Supreet's idea. She thanked her and said that she would present it to the king. However, she decided to keep Supreet's idea to herself and pretend that it was her own. She didn't want to share the credit or the reward with Supreet.
When she went to the castle to present her idea to the king, King Maximus was very impressed. He thanked her and said that he would consider it carefully. He also told her that she had done a very good job of using factors to solve the problem.
"Factors are the parts that make up a whole," the king explained. "In this case, the food is the whole, and the smaller pieces are the factors. By dividing the food into smaller pieces, you are using factors to make sure that everyone has enough to eat."
Emma was very happy to have won the contest, and she was proud of herself for using factors to come up with a solution to a problem. She didn't tell anyone that the idea was actually Supreet's, and she accepted the reward for herself.
However, the king soon found out that Emma had not been truthful about the origin of the idea. He was very disappointed in her and decided to punish her for her dishonesty.
He ordered Emma to roam all over the kingdom and teach the concept of factors to all of the children, dogs, and cats. She was to spend the rest of her life traveling from place to place, sharing her knowledge and helping others to understand this important concept.
Emma was very sorry for what she had done, and she accepted her punishment. She set out on her journey, traveling from village to village and teaching the concept of factors to anyone who would listen.
She met many new people and animals along the way, and she made many new friends. She also learned a lot from the people and animals she met, and she became a much wiser and better person as a result.
Despite the challenges and difficulties she faced, Emma remained determined and committed to her task. She continued to teach the concept of factors to all who would listen, and she helped many people and animals to understand and apply this important concept in their own lives.
In the end, Emma's hard work and dedication paid off. She became known throughout the kingdom as a great teacher and a wise and kind person. And she lived the rest of her life in peace and happiness, knowing that she had made a positive difference in the lives of others.