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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

#161

Post by adamauckland »

robertlagrant wrote: post #146
makoto12 wrote: post #141

I hate this so very much. Automating creativity is so gross. Never mind the fact that these models are trained on stolen artwork and texts.

If a person learns how to paint expertly by looking at (and even copying, stroke for stroke) paintings, would you consider that immoral, and those paintings having been stolen? If not, what would you say the difference is?

Morality aside, an artist who entirely copies someone else's work would be looked down upon because they are not original or creating anything novel or new.

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

#162

Post by stagas »

mmustapic wrote: post #89
POPOSYS wrote: post #79

Sorry, but the story is missing a very important ingredient for a kids book: I can not identify any deeper moral or social or any idea. While stories "just for fun" have of course a right to exist, it is very questionable to fill your kids brain solely with random, empty, meaningless fun stories. Stories for kids are an important part of helping to build a moral compass for the world. Besides "getting rich quick with…

Children learn much more than morals when they are small. Even "nothing happens" stories have some value for them, they teach them other normal things (bread making?), or trigger some thoughts (you need to investigate sometimes). The problem with this story is that it's stupid, there's no explanation for the fairy's behaviour, and the butter park doesn't make sense.

It's a lesson that stuff happen, then other stuff follow, wait for those. Turns out, it's just more stuff. And it's ok to be this way. I'd say it's a lesson in Zen.

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

#163

Post by stagas »

POPOSYS wrote: post #79

Sorry, but the story is missing a very important ingredient for a kids book: I can not identify any deeper moral or social or any idea. While stories "just for fun" have of course a right to exist, it is very questionable to fill your kids brain solely with random, empty, meaningless fun stories. Stories for kids are an important part of helping to build a moral compass for the world. Besides "getting rich quick with…

Sometimes a story is just something happens and nice pictures. Not every story needs to be indoctrinating specific arbitrary morals that humans like to impose on others. Let a story be in itself just a story of some thing and which no big deal happens. Most of life is like that, and should be enjoyed that way. There's the moral story you asked for.

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

#164

Post by hnbad »

Moru wrote: post #39
throwaway675309 wrote: post #18

Yeah there was a very viral piece of news last month about a guy who did this exact same thing for his kid: https://80.lv/articles/children-s-book-generated-with-chatgp... 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.

To be honest I had the same thought 10-15 years ago when I was reading stories to my daughter. It was all written after a template, changing names of places, characters and goals for the story. Many were based on Harry Potter with kids going to magic schools and saving the world. Even a series of them with exactly the same story in each book, just a new goal for each book. The series covered half a shelf at the local…

There's a huge industry of ghostwriting bad children's books based on what's popular. Zoe Bee did a great video on her experience writing unlicensed Minecraft stories[0].

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)

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

#165

Post by newswasboring »

linusekenstam wrote: post #144

Hello Daniel! We've been working on a platform/tool for this since September. And it's live in Alpha right now, https://bedtimestory.ai We are working on a lot of feature requests and improvements at the moment, and distribution. Text, Audio and Video being the primary use-cases. Making stories 100% editable and upload your own images is also in the works. We are working on "Magic Images" that will allow you to inser…

Did I miss it somewhere or you don't actually make physical copies for these? I would love that; I know the perfect people to gift that subscription to. Let them generate a few stories and maybe once per month select a book to get printed and delivered. This is a genuinely exciting product.

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

#166

Post by newswasboring »

makoto12 wrote: post #141

I hate this so very much. Automating creativity is so gross. Never mind the fact that these models are trained on stolen artwork and texts.

All advances in creative tooling are automating creativity. What are you on about? Look at photoshop color selector automates mixing paint, digital filters for audio automate analog mixers. This attitude towards AI creative tools is gatekeeping.

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

#167

Post by adamauckland »

stagas wrote: post #159
Devasta wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a kid won't be able to, and if they can they won't be able to articulate whats wrong with it. From the perspective of anyone going into AI, that makes children the perfect target for the mass produced blended garbage that AI generates.

What elevates a human story higher than ChatGPT's? Do our brains have some hidden trascendental property that LLMs can never get to? Or is it simply our own biases once we learn that this is the product of an algorithm rather than human-made?

Unpredictability. ChatGPT writes stories like children do. Very wordy and boring. Then this happened then that happened.

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.

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

#168

Post by jillesvangurp »

nstart wrote: post #21

There is a market, at least within south east asia, that mass produces stories like aesop's fables, and regional folklore. The books produced are thin 2minute reads and are available for purchase for less than 1 USD usually. It's not surprising to see grammatical and spelling errors slip into the prints of some of these books. The artwork is basic and while stylistically more consistent than OP's effort, it's entirel…

If you look around on Amazon a bit for books, you'll find a lot of low quality, high volume, and highly formulaic stuff aimed at different types of readers. Basically authors are churning out masses of stories with relatively simple, predictable plots with a lot of action/sex/intrigue/whatever geared to readers that gobble that stuff up as fast as it can be produced.

With AI you can improve the quality of the writing, tweak the style of delivery, add detail to story lines, and deliver stories faster.

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

#169

Post by ido »

zerop wrote: post #116

Though I like AI producing "Human alike" work, but I would like to caution ourselves on consuming everything AI is producing in such use cases. Human creativity should be first preference and avoid to be replaced, based on outcome of consuming AI work.

What is the outcome of consuming AI work?
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