Hey Readers,

In today’s post, I want to share one of the first episodes of a new podcast I’m working on. In the podcast I will be exploring the world of AI to understand how it’s going to change the way we live, work and play, by interviewing creators, builders and researchers. In this episode, I interview Ammaar Reshi, a designer who recently wrote, illustrated and published a children’s book using AI! I highlighted Ammaar’s in my first post a few weeks ago as a great example of how AI is making creativity more accessible to everyone.

In the interview, Ammaar shares what inspired him to use AI to write a children’s book, the backlash he received from the online artist community and his perspective on how AI will impact art in the future. If you’re new to AI and haven’t yet tried using Generative AI tools like ChatGPT or MidJourney, this is a great video to watch because Ammaar also shows us step-by-step how he created his children’s book. This is a must-watch for parents, educators or budding authors who might want to make their own children’s book too!

To get the most out of this episode, I recommend you watch the video so you can see how all the AI tools we cover work > Youtube Video

I hope you enjoy this episode. I’ll be officially launching the podcast in a few weeks, so it will be available on your favorite podcast player soon. In the meantime, I’ll be sharing more episodes here as I record them and I would love your feedback in the comments!

Show Notes

Links from the episode

* Ammaar’s Twitter post on how he created a children’s book in a weekend:

* Ammaar’s book “Alice and Sparkles”: https://www.amazon.sg/Alice-Sparkle-exciting-childrens-technology/dp/B0BNV5KMD8

* Ammaar’s Batman video:

* ChatGPT for story writing: http://chat.openai.com

* MidJourney for illustrations: Midjourney.com

* Discord for using MidJourney: https://discord.com

* PixelMator for upscaling your illustrations: https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/

* Apple Pages for laying out your book: https://www.apple.com/pages/

* Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for publishing your book: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

Episode Contents:

* (00:00 ) Introduction

* (01:55 ) Ammaar’s story

* (05:25 ) Backlash from artists

* (12:20 ) From AI books to AI videos

* (16:20 ) The steps to creating a book with AI

* (18:55 ) Using ChatGPT to write an children’s story

* (23:45 ) Describing illustrations with ChatGPT

* (26:00 ) Illustrating with MidJourney

* (35:30 ) Improving prompts in Midjourney

* (37:20 ) Midjourney Pricing

* (40:00 ) Downloading image from MidJourney

* (44:20 ) Upscaling with Pixelmator

* (49:25 ) Laying out book with Apple Pages

* (53:40 ) Publishing on Amazon KDP

* (55:35 ) Ammaar shows us his hardcover book

* (56:25 ) Wrap-up

Full Transcript

[00:00:00 ]

Introduction

ammaar: I think it has to start with your idea of a story, right? I think, you know, people might think, okay, you press a button, it spits out a book, but I think it has to start with your imagination. And then we will provide that to ChatGPT to kind of give us a base for our story. I think then we'll iterate with ChatGPT almost like a brainstorming partner. We're gonna go back and forth. We're gonna expand on characters and the arcs that we might want to, you know, go through. And I think once we have that, Then we go back to imagining again.

We have to think through how do you take that script and that story and you bring it to life, how do you visualize it? And that's where MidJourney comes in. And we're gonna generate art that fits that narrative and expresses that narrative in a really nice way. And then we can combine it all together with you know, pages to create that book format.

aj_asver: Hey everyone, and welcome to the Hitchhikers Guide to ai. I'm your tour guide AJ Aser, and in this podcast I explore the world of artificial intelligence to learn how AI will impact the way we live, work, [00:01:00 ] and play. Now, if you're a parent like me in the middle of reading a book to your kids, this thought may have crossed your mind.

Hey, I think I could write one of these, but the idea of writing and publishing a children's book to many. Is a distant fantasy that is until now, because generative AI is making it easier than ever for anyone to become an author or illustrator.

Just like today's guest, Ammaar Reshi who wrote illustrated and published a children's book for his friend's children in one weekend using the latest AI products including ChatGPT and MidJourney in this episode. Ammaar's going to show us exactly how he did it.

So Hitch A Ride with me is we explore the exciting world of generative AI in this episode of the Hitchhiker Guide to ai.

Ammaar's Story

aj_asver: Hi Ammaar it's great to have you on the podcast.

ammaar: Hi. Great to be here, AJ. How are you doing?

aj_asver: I'm great. I'm so excited for you [00:02:00 ] to join me on this podcast especially to be one of the first people I'm interviewing. It's gonna be a learning experience for me, and we'll work it out together.

But anyway, I'm so excited to have you here. I talked about you in my newsletter in the first post because I thought what you did by publishing your book, Alison Sparkles, was such a great example of how AI is gonna change the world around us and really make creativity and being a creator a much more achievable and approachable thing for most people.

Since your book was published on Amazon in December of last year, you have sold, what is it, over 900 copies. Is that right?

ammaar: Yeah. It's about 1,200 now, so yeah. Crazy

aj_asver: That is amazing!

ammaar: Yeah, it's been wild

aj_asver: That is so cool. And at the same time, you've found yourself at the center of a growing debate about AI and the future of art. So tell us how it all happened.

Rewind us back to the start. What made you a designer at a tech company decide to publish a children's book?

ammaar: I guess what kicked it off to go all the way back to two of [00:03:00 ] my best friends basically had their first kids. And I went to visit one of them. She had turned one years old. And I went over and it was around her bedtime where she grabbed my hand and took me upstairs. And I was like, what's going on? And they're like, she's picked you tonight to read her bedtime story . So I was like, wow. I was like, I am honored.

This is one step closer to being that cool uncle. She hands me this book I was something about getting all these animals delivered from the zoo. And so I was, I mean my friend was there and I was reading her this book and we were both laughing cuz we were like, this book makes no sense at all.

This story is so random. But she loved it. You know, she loved it. She loved the art, she loved everything about it. And it then kind of hit me in that moment. I was like, it'd be really fun to tell her story of my own, you know? I just had no idea how I was gonna go and do that yet.

I told my friend, I was like, I think the next time I come over, there's gonna be a book on her shelf. It's gonna be mine. And he was like how are you gonna do that? I was like, well, gimme a weekend. I'll figure it out, right..

I had already been playing with MidJourney like sometime in February [00:04:00 ] of uh, last year.

And so, You know, I, I knew generative AI and the artwork stuff was there and it was really cool. And Dall-E also had blown up around then. And so yeah I knew okay, if I wanted to illustrate this book, I could lean on MidJourney to help me with some of the creation, but I hadn't yet come across ChatGPT. And a friend of mine actually, just that moment, like that Friday message meeting, he's have you seen ChatGPT? I've been playing with it all weekend, all week. I've even created music and chords and like chord progressions and stuff with it. And I was like, that's crazy. Like I wonder if it could help me craft a story, like a children's story.

And then I wanted the story to be something a little meta, you know, something about. But also a little personal. I remember as a kid, like my dad let me play with his computer when I was like four or five years old, right? And I, that kind of led me down the path of going into tech and like all of that and that curiosity.

And so I basically wanted to mash those two. It was [00:05:00 ] this young girl who's curious about technology, and specifically about ai and then ends up making her own. And that's essentially the prompt that I gave ChatGPT and that's what set off, the path into making this book.

aj_asver: That is such a cool story. I think the bit you talked about where you're like reading this book with a child and you're lucky because as an uncle you don't have to do it a hundred times.

ammaar: That's what he said. Yeah.

Backlack from artists

aj_asver: Yeah. It can get pretty tiresome and you're like, and you