Prickles in the Woods: an AI-generated children’s story
A book created using AI.
I’m not sure if it’s good or terrible -
but keep reading, download it at the end,
and you tell me.
Recently I was granted beta access to both GPT-3 and Dall-E 2. These are cutting-edge artificial intelligence here in mid-2022, and I’ve really enjoyed playing with them. For a few weeks now, I keep wondering what kind of children’s book could be created just with these two programs - GPT-3 for the text, and Dall-E 2 for the illustrations.
Today I decided to find out, and with the help of these tools, created “Prickles in the Woods” - the title was created by me, but the entire text of the story and every single illustration was done by AI. There’s a link to download the final PDF product at the end of my story here.
The way to create text with GPT-3 is simply tell it what you want. Here’s a photo of the interface, with my prompt I gave it at the top and the story it returned below:
whoa.
This was created at 9:32am and the setup time for it was less than 10 minutes of quick research and preliminary settings adjustments. I made sure it was set to GPT-3’s best available model, set the desired max output length, and checked that it wasn’t going to be expensive. It ended up costing almost $0.02 of compute power on my OpenAI account.
I thought the very first draft it gave me of the story was pretty good, so I moved on over to Dall-E to get to work on the images.
Dall-E 2 prompts are pretty addicting. I once spent 6 hours just seeing what it’s capable of, and I barely scratched the surface.
I have tons of crazy examples, but that’s another post for another day.
Here’s the first set of results I got for this project. Dall-E always gives a set of 4 results, each a variation representing its different interpretations of your prompt.
It takes about 10-20 seconds from the time you press Generate to receive your results.
Generally no matter what you ask for, what you get will be a combination of amazing, absurd, and vaguely disturbing.
To me, these are excellent qualities to have in illustrations for a children’s book.
The image generating stage of this project was definitely the most time-consuming. I spent about an hour and a half creating and downloading the initial set of illustrations. Some things Dall-E was great at, and others needed lots of elaboration and repeated attempts. Still, illustrating an entire book in under 2 hours is super easy compared to actually doing the illustration work.
Next, it was time, as they say on the internet, to draw the rest of the freaking owl. I decided that it would probably be easiest to use Canva to create the book, and I’m very glad I took that route. Canva really does live up to all the hype, and I believe that anybody that hates on Canva simply resents all the time they spent learning to use some other less user friendly product.
Authoring the book in Canva took about 2 hours from start to final download. Not bad. One thing that helped me to quickly get a product I am happy with was actually an amazing Valentine’s Day gift from Sam I’ve had sitting on my hard drive - a custom hand-made font.
She makes me the cutest grocery lists and post-its, and I had remarked several times that I wish I had her handwriting as a font on my computer. So, she learned how to make fonts, and presented me with this gift. I think it’s one of the best gifts I have ever received. And it’s perfect for this project! Choosing a font can be something I really get stuck on sometimes, and Sam Serif was perfect for this book.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this book. I will ship you a 7-inch physical copy for $50 if you really want one - but you’re probably best off just downloading it here for free and enjoying it on your iPad. Share your thoughts with me on Twitter @chrisremboldt or email me directly at chris@chrisremboldt.com.
Cheers, and I hope this helps inspire you to go make something for fun as well!