Should Professional Illustrators be Mad at an Author Who Used AI to Create a Children's Book

Should Professional Illustrators be Mad at an Author Who Used AI to Create a Children's Book

When a drove of generative AI tools started hitting the market over the last few months, Ammaar Reshi, a design manager at Brex (a fintech company), started tinkering around with them. Soon, he realized he wanted to author a children's book for one of his firends kid - using AI. 

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First, Reshi used ChatGPT to come up with a story 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.”.

Reshi, kept on using ChatGPT and Sparkle to keep on refining the characters, where Alice should be more curios and Sparkle more self-aware. Then Reshi used Midjourney to create illustrations, “I just started putting prompts like ‘young girl’ and some descriptors: ‘blue eyes,’ ‘simple dress,’ ‘excited,’ ‘curious,’” he said. “That yielded some results. The results were not immediately usable, but Reshi kept on refining his input. It took him many hours to finally create 13 images, for his 14 page book. 

Using Amazon's, Kindle Direct Publishing, Reshi soon had Alice and Sparkle published on Dec 4th. This was within 72 hours of coming up with the idea. When he shared his journey on Instagram, there was suddenly a wide range of buyers. Then came the haters. When Reshi shared the same news 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 based in the UK, who said she had a “sinking feeling in the pit of [her] stomach,” when she saw Reshi’s tweet. “I’m thinking, Is it really that easy to create something that I had to pour my heart and soul into?" Roper said.

Another UK based children’s author Josie Dom refused to download Reshi’s book. “I don’t feel he deserves to earn any money from the book, because he has not actually put much work into it,” she said. However, based on reading the sample pages on Amazon, Dom said, she is “concerned that the use of AI in creating stories will create a proliferation of poor-quality stories, both on the writing and the illustration side.”, “It’s also flat and boring,” Dom added. “All readers deserve rich, imaginative stories — with children’s stories, especially. They serve to entertain, as well as educate.” She said that Reshi’s book failed in those regards.

Reshi said that he didn’t anticipate the backlash, including death threats and messages encouraging self-harm. Overall, he’s seen the experience as a learning one — and a chastening one. 

“I am grateful that it’s publicized a very critical debate and discussion that’s to be had,” he said. “I’m honestly just saddened by how that debate has played out. The hateful rhetoric and the abuse is really not fun to read."

Will there be a second chapter in the story of Alice and Sparkle, Reshi is not too certain about it. 

“I think I’m going to hold off on that until I learn more about how this art is being used and if there are ways to use it while also protecting artists,” he said. “I don’t just want to preach that — I want to practice it.” 

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