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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

#351

Post by smrtinsert »

weeksie wrote: post #249

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…

> because they're not novel, they're remixes

There's only so many words in the english language. If I ask ChatGPT to write me a story about how a I turn into a super hero tomato that saves the world against the villainy of pasta, that's a novel story I'm pretty sure.

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

#352

Post by tomp »

weeksie wrote: post #249

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…

Wait until you see the movie Avatar.

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

#353

Post by adamsmith143 »

boca_honey wrote: post #344
adamsmith143 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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. From HN FAQ: > 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

The OP comment can also be seen as an internet trope displaying poor understanding of the topic.

You can't teach someone who is unwilling to learn.

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

#354

Post by the_af »

yamtaddle wrote: post #348
the_af wrote: 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 u…

Everything you mentioned worries me.

> What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do?

Others have answered "but ChatGPT will never get as good at this". Let's, for the sake of argument, suppose that it does: suppose ChatGPT does get better.

What then? Why is it a net win for mankind that a computer program can tell better (or "good enough") stories? If mechanical tasks get done by machines, and creative tasks get done by machines, and games get played by machines, and everything under the sun gets done by machines...

...what's left for us, then? Writing is an enjoyable activity for humans. It's not something to "optimize", it's fine as it is. If we optimize humans out of the activity of writing (or composing music, or drawing, etc), have we truly "won"?

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

#355

Post by theRealMe »

belval wrote: post #279
adamsmith143 wrote: post #276

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...

It's not an expectation that a book will be a masterpiece of storytelling. Take the very hungry caterpillar, it has the simplest premise: -> Caterpillar eats food -> Caterpillar eats more food -> Caterpillar eats even more food -> Caterpillar gets sick -> Caterpillar eats less food -> Butterfly. The succession of events have a thread that join them together. I'm pretty sure ChatGPT could write it as well if you give…

As someone that has been reading multiple children’s books per day for the last 5 years to my children, let me tell you that some books are like what you describe with a nice intertwined story that makes sense together and then some other books feel like randomly thrown together scenes like this that are just “and then this happened… and then this happened…”. I tend to notice a lot of the latter come from either 1. Celebrities that decide they want to be children’s book authors, or 2. Somebody that wants to make cool pictures and adds the story as an afterthought. With how nice these pictures are for OP’s book, it would probably be tricked into thinking this book was written by person #2.

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

#356

Post by thealexshaq »

c7b wrote: post #92
thealexshaq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did :)

Congrats, looks really amazing! May I ask what your AI stack is? Do you use MidJourney for the images and GPT for the stories or something else? How do you ensure the output stays consistent across images - do you use the seed image and a custom set of prompts for each image, or did you use eg StableDiffusion and did some customized training à la Dreambooth to ensure consistency? Is the workflow fully automated, or a…

Thanks so much! Happy to share our stack: - GPT3 davinci-003 writes the story - we did a lot of manual experimenting w prompts and used that to fine-tune GPT3 which now generates the image prompts for us - Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth generate the images (we train a model on your hero which gets deleted once your story is finished)

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!

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

#357

Post by makoto12 »

tomp wrote: post #204
makoto12 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's moral for a big corporation to profit on pirating works from small artists?

For-profit piracy is questionable (there’s pros and cons, it could unleash a ton of creativity) but what we’re discussing here is non-profit, personal use piracy.

I'm more referring to the companies offering the tools. While some are free to use (for now), they are still profiting from this type of personal use. often being able to convert to a paid model later down the line, think github copilot

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

#358

Post by debugnik »

reyqn wrote: post #160
debugnik wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they wouldn't claim to assemble it. It's clear to me these people using AI so heavily don't have an authorship role at all, but a publishing one.

It's not so clear to me. AI is just a tool you use like any other.

In that case are publishers also authors when the artists and writers are (contracted) tools like any other?

This is just as rehash of the debate around authorship for prompting a single image. If you had typed the same prompt on Google and picked a picture, or hired an artist with that prompt, you wouldn't claim to be the artist. Therefore you're having a different role than that in the process, ML model or not: publisher, producer, whatever.

The sooner these people come to terms with it, the better, so they can promote themselves for the skills they actually have (lackluster as I find them) and leave actual authors to carve their own niches among the incoming flood of generated content.

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

#359

Post by the_af »

corysama wrote: post #323
the_af wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What actual problem about writing would this solve? This is like coming up with a plot idea and having some hired writer write it. This already existed before computers. So you're essentially using GPT as a ghostwriter, only (unlike human ghostwriters) it has no way to come with something innovative, it just regurgitates whatever it's already in its data in some way or another. "But," I can guess you'll object, "huma…

Do we need another song about love? Do we need another library for formatting text? Do we need another bedtime story? No, we probably don’t. Won’t and shouldn’t stop people from making more :)

Excellent point.

The world doesn't need another love song [1]. But the human composing it might need it, as a form of expression, even if the result is garbage or trite. Humans enjoy creating stuff, even if nobody wants that stuff. Writers write, or their minds will explode. The creation process is its own goal.

This is not the case for ChatGPT; a LLM has no motivations.

[1] https://youtu.be/jJHbJukQi8k?t=42

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

#360

Post by duderific »

sporkland wrote: post #294
weeksie wrote: post #249

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. 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…

> I could see this eating into that

Perhaps, if the cover was engaging enough. However this seems like the kind of story that my child (4 1/2) might read once and then never pick up again. She'd be like "ew, who wants butter all over their kitchen?"

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