Tech worker used AI to create children’s book, making authors and artists mad
A tech worker is selling a children's book he made using AI. Professional illustrators are pissed. https://t.co/7SRj7ntQej
- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) December 14, 2022
Ammaar Reshi, working at fintech company Brex, as design manager. Reshi began tinkering with AI tools and had the idea to make a book for kids, using AI. Using ChatGPT to create dialogue, he came up with a tale about Alice, a young girl who wants to learn about tech, and Sparkle, a robot who helps her.
He asked ChatGPT to make Alice curious and Sparkle self-aware. Reshi then used the AI app Midjourney to create the images he wanted. “I just started putting prompts like ‘young girl’ and descriptors: ‘blue eyes,’ ‘simple dress,’ ‘excited,’ ‘curious,’” and yielded some results.” He spent hours tweaking the prompts to get 13 images that fill the 14-page book.
Reshi uploaded it to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, on Dec. 4, just 72 hours after he first came up with the idea. Friends encouraged him to release more widely. But when Reshi posted about the book on Twitter, people, including children’s book illustrators, criticized him for automating the process at the expense of human creativity.
One critic is Anupa Roper, a children’s book author, said she had a “sinking feeling in the pit of [her] stomach,” when she saw Reshi’s tweet. “Is it really that easy to create something that I had to pour my heart and soul into?" Roper said. Other children’s authors are straight up refusing to download the book and are concerned that the use of AI in creating stories will create a proliferation of poor-quality stories, on the writing and illustration side.
Users have noticed that Alice and Sparkle has “quite a few anomalies” in the illustrations and worries that AI platforms are trained on other people’s work, an issue many artists have highlighted. “Artists are underpaid, and this won’t help them, their work is being stolen, basically.”
Children’s authors say the story is “formulaic” - a result of being produced by a computer program. Flat and boring. “Readers deserve rich, imaginative stories - children’s stories, especially. They serve to entertain and educate.”
Reshi said he didn’t anticipate the backlash and has received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm.
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