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Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

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Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#341

A fun experiment but LLM generated stories will never escape the uncanny valley, because they're not novel, they're remixes. I know the critique of that position is "but humans just remix the things they know from the world" but that is the same misunderstanding that those who thought truck driving jobs would be automated by 2018 made about that profession. i.e. The less you know about a field, the more likely you ar…

AI art replacing real art would effectively be human culture imploding in on itself.

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A fun experiment but LLM generated stories will never escape the uncanny valley, because they're not novel, they're remixes. Much of children's best-selling fiction is extremely derivative. The way the market works, it's nearly impossible to get things published that aren't extremely derivative. To the extent that, I think this might actually be a good place to start - with auto-generated derivative garbage - and t…

The true measure is will a very young child notice and/or care. My guess is they won't and they'll like the story. Only the adults reading it will notice something off/weird/"uncanny" about it. But of course, it's the adults buying/distributing these books so you still need to "sell" it to them first.

Kids happily get sucked into Minecraft video narrative "series" with totally insane plots that make no sense and are basically gibberish even line-to-line, and into dirt-cheap Asian and Eastern European CG cartoon imports on Netflix that are barely better. I'm 100% sure a mostly-AI creative process could produce something higher quality than those... um, genres, I guess, today.

(seriously, there's some so-cheap-I'm-not-sure-why-they-bothered kids' cartoons on Netflix, if you look for them—you're on the right track if it looks like it was rendered with mid-grade 2005 desktop 3D rendering tech using stock models and stock scenes with way-too-little decoration or clutter, despite in-fact dating no earlier than 2015. A lot of them have whole scenes that are basically just the characters talking in circles. The plots are always extremely straightforward and about 1/5 as much plot as they should need to fill the time, even by very generous reckoning. Lots of interpersonal conflict that amounts to nothing, existing just so they can have two characters have some conflict in a scene to absolutely no thematic-, message-, characterization-, or plot-related end. Most turn out to have been originally produced in India or Romania or something, if you start digging. It's crazy. But young kids will watch these.)

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#343

A fun experiment but LLM generated stories will never escape the uncanny valley, because they're not novel, they're remixes. I know the critique of that position is "but humans just remix the things they know from the world" but that is the same misunderstanding that those who thought truck driving jobs would be automated by 2018 made about that profession. i.e. The less you know about a field, the more likely you ar…

> A fun experiment but LLM generated stories will never escape the uncanny valley, because they're not novel, they're remixes Kid's books aren't intended to be novel. It's not like a four year old is going to say, "Man, this is a retread of Hamlet!" They are often re-tellings packaged up in a new way to appeal to kids in the current generation. Sometimes as simple as removing sexist, classist, and/or racist elements.

It's initially the parent who'll pick the book though (or the critic? the people who decide what to put in the front window of the bookstore? probably not the four year old though), so the uncanniness could come into play.

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#344

A fun experiment but LLM generated stories will never escape the uncanny valley, because they're not novel, they're remixes. I know the critique of that position is "but humans just remix the things they know from the world" but that is the same misunderstanding that those who thought truck driving jobs would be automated by 2018 made about that profession. i.e. The less you know about a field, the more likely you ar…

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This is not Reddit or Twitter. Think about what you want to say before posting. Meme responses are usually a sign that you don't really know what you're talking about.

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> Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#345
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do this analysis on other children's books, I think you will find something similar. These aren't masterpieces of storytelling...

The ones that have stood the test of time are masterpieces of storytelling. They shine insight into a facet of life. They have a strong throughline, a message without moralizing. The best ones ground an experience to make it tangible to parent and child. Where the Wild Things Are - a fever dream about rebellion and unrealized sexuality, hero's journey into the latent world and back. Green Eggs and Ham - picky eating…

>I'd take out the filler "journey" bit, add in some conflict between the mom and kid, and make the ending more realistic (fairy uses magic to make icing for the cake?). That might bring it up to library-filler tier book.

THIS. This is exactly the power of these models. The AI generated an entire story in some extremely quick amount of time and an experience Human can edit and curate the results. It generates first drafts trivially.

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be real, copyright/attribution is only one complaint, a tiny part of the sudden hatred against AI art/creativity. When somebody brings up the invention of photoshop, they're not trying to disprove a point about paying salaries to the devs, and I am sure you knew that.

> Be real, copyright/attribution is only one complaint, a tiny part of the sudden hatred against AI art/creativity. When the artists whose work was stolen to train these models are compensated for that work then maybe its a "tiny part". Until then it is taking peoples work and using it to create an ultimate competitor in their own market that they cannot compete with. They now have to compete against themselves and t…

This kind of wording reminds me of a very old (probably outdated) argument about theft of digital goods. In meatspace when you steal something you are depriving someone of a thing. If I steal your biscuit, you don't have the biscuit. But if I copy a picture of the biscuit you are still left with your own picture, perfect and identical in every way. If I'm not reselling that image to everyone, you lost on that one sale. I wonder if openAI goes and pays retail price for each image they used, would this discussion finally end?

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#347
A friend of mine has introduced his first grader to ChatGPT, Dall-E, etc.

Now one of his favorite games is "AI" and he lights up in wonder typing the kinds of things at a prompt a first grader would.

I don't have kids and wouldn't dare wade into parenting approaches but compared to how most of the kids I've seen interact with technology this (to me) is very promising. Compared to watching endless YouTube videos or even playing Minecraft or whatever it's a lot easier to see how "playing AI" could progress to a genuine interest in technology beyond staring at a tablet.

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#348
post #221

As an experiment, this is cool. As actual usage? I enjoy making stories up (or misremembering existing ones) for my daughter. The human touch is valuable to me. I also wonder: many well-loved stories of today started as a story the writer was telling his/her children; one example is The Hobbit. What if Tolkien had thought "screw this, I'm overworked and tired, I'll just type some prompt for ChatGPT and it will be eno…

I'm starting to worry that we're going to run pretty short of activities humans find fulfilling to do, that have any notable amount of extrinsic reward or value.

What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do? When you turn the computer loose on them for a week and, well, god damn, by the end of the week they seem to have taken exactly the lessons they needed and are bringing them up in real-life situations and are even getting better at reading themselves, and raving about how good the stories are, and you can't deny that if you'd done it, the results wouldn't have been as good?

Now repeat for all the ways that humans find it satisfying to serve others using their creativity.

I very much doubt it's healthy for all the things we find fulfilling and enjoyable to have only intrinsic motivation to drive them.

It's hard to turn down better outcomes, but what if a side-effect is that as a species we become psychologically (even spiritually, if you will) lost? So kids are raised more effectively—but for what? So that all the things they enjoy doing are valuable to, and needed or wanted by, exactly no-one?

So we get more efficient at producing goods and entertainment—for what? So the brushes and paints we buy for our paintings that nobody cares to see and that your talentless cousin can outdo—in every way, including sublimity and mood and all that—with a lazy prompt on some future image generator, are somewhat cheaper? What's the point?

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#349
post #257
post #221

As an experiment, this is cool. As actual usage? I enjoy making stories up (or misremembering existing ones) for my daughter. The human touch is valuable to me. I also wonder: many well-loved stories of today started as a story the writer was telling his/her children; one example is The Hobbit. What if Tolkien had thought "screw this, I'm overworked and tired, I'll just type some prompt for ChatGPT and it will be eno…

It is vaguely dystopian, true, but one thing I remember in order to sleep at night is that ChatGPT and the like are trained on human-written text. So we might currently be looking at ChatGPT at its very best, or close to its very best. Reasoning: from here on out, the stuff it trains on will be polluted with the automatically generated text. Photo copies of photo copies eventually lead to blurrier and crummier images…

I agree with the premise that content will get more polluted, but there is an element of human vote every time we choose a prompt output and say “this is good enough for me to post/use/turn into a book”.

This is just a very convoluted way of manually labeling data as good and bad.

Re: Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney

#350
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, I'm pretty sure your analogy fell off the truck and got ran over at some point... Trying to take the 'freshness' of food and compare it to storytelling is just an abject failure here as the vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast majority of storytelling has no freshness at all, it's rehashing of the same basic plot elements, hell, was it the Greeks that stated this a few thousand years ago?

you are conflating storytelling with the plot ... see how easy is to criticise analogies ... there is/was plenty of fresh storytelling in every age

And you're confusing the tall flowers from the field. Dime novels and pulp mags are a great example of this. You're remembering the good stuff because it's stuck around and the cheap, mass produced trashed ended up in a burn pile.
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