But Is It Really A Book? A Techie Uses AI To Make A Children’s Book
Design manager Ammaar Reshi used AIs ChatGPT and Midjourney to create the text and images for a children’s book, which he titled Alice and Sparkle.
It looks like a book, but is it really a book? Any writer, including myself, is probably likely to say no: Books take months and usually years to write, and illustrations for children’s books are usually painstakingly detailed. The word choice, the aesthetic of the book, and, of course, the inspiration — the preciousness of it all — makes us feel like book-writing is a different process than simply iterating over and over using an AI.
Reshi spent hours discarding hundreds of images that were too spooky for a children’s book.
“Now, let me tell you, some of those results were absolutely wack. It would have become a horror book if I put those early illustrations in,” he said.
Yes, to me, a lot of AI art still has that Coraline’s-mom-with-button-eyes quality, but the finished images Reshi selected do not look horrifying. However, it’s strange that when using AI to make art, we have to do this kind of crawling out of the uncanny valley…teach a machine what is and is not creepy.
So what is this, if not a book? Reshi created this piece of work in about 72 hours, and put it on Amazon. He…
