Ammaar Reshi, 28, has been fascinated by technology since he was a child. “I was always curious, and my dad let me play with his computer when I was 5 years old,” he said. He grew up in Pakistan before his family moved to the UK, where Reshi studied computer science in London. A job at Palantir Technologies led Reshi to Palo Alto, California, and since 2020 he’s worked at fintech company Brex, where he’s now a design manager.
When a raft of generative AI tools started to hit the market over the last few months, Reshi began tinkering with them. Earlier this month, he had the idea to make a book for his best friends’ kid, who was born this year, using AI. “I said I was going to take a weekend to try to put this out there,” he recalled.
First, Reshi used ChatGPT to come up with a tale about Alice, a young girl who wants to learn about the world of tech, and Sparkle, a cutesy robot who helps her. “That gave me a base of a story,” Reshi said. “It was OK. It had its issues, of course. So then I started tweaking it.”
He asked ChatGPT to make Alice a bit more curious and Sparkle more self-aware. Reshi then used the AI app Midjourney to create the images he wanted. “I just started putting prompts like ‘young girl’ and some descriptors: ‘blue eyes,’ ‘simple dress,’ ‘excited,’ ‘curious,’” he said. “That yielded some results. Now, let me tell you, some of those results were absolutely wack. It would have become a horror book if I put those early illustrations in.”
He spent hours tweaking the prompts given to Midjourney, estimating that he rejected “hundreds” of illustrations in order to get the 13 that fill the 14-page book. “I almost gave up because I was like, I don’t know if it’s possible, but then I just pushed through at the end,” he said.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisstokelwalker/tech-worker-ai-childrens-book-angers-illustrators
