AI: The Apocalypse of Authorship?
AI-assisted authoring: the rise of a new profession
What is the chance of a dyslexic man with no prior writing and publishing experience in becoming an author? Meet my new friend, Kamil Banc, a native of Germany who now considers Florida (USA) home, a parfume businessman who has deep passion for artificial intelligence (AI). The businessman turned author self-published Bedtime Stories: Short and Sweet for a Good Night’s Sleep — a 24-page children’s bedtime story book that teaches children virtues such as honesty, responsibility, forgiveness, fairness, and courage — in December 2022 via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (now available in Amazon.com), making him one of the pioneers of AI-assisted authoring.
It is not difficult to fathom that storybook writing especially children’s book requires wordsmithship, creative zeal, parsimonious storytelling that makes complex ideas look simple, and — a good illustrator who can transform words into visuals that can speak about the story.
Thanks to ChatGPT — a large language model (LLM) AI — and Midjourney — a text to visual AI — perhaps among the most well known AI tools today, Banc whipped up the story and the visual illustrations all by himself. In Banc’s Bedtime Stories, he matches the story about the 10-moral virtues (where he defines them one by one) for children — and match them with surreal animals (have you seen a green tiger? a blue giraffe? a silver salamander?). He is also generous — practicing what he preaches in the storybook — as he gladly shared his experience in producing the storybook and put it up in a YouTube video. But Banc is not alone.
There are at least two more AI-assisted authors: Brett Schickler, a salesman from Rochester (USA) who wrote and published The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing — a 30-page book that teaches children about saving and investing and is now available in Amazon.com — and Amaar Reshi, a product designer based in Silicon Valley, who authored and published Alice and Sparkle, a 26-page book that encourages curiosity and learning among children and is available in Amazon.com. Schickler and Reshi also used ChatGPT and other AI tools to whip up these books.
The AI-assisted authoring sounds like the apocalypse for the authoring profession. End-of-the-world talks about how AI will replace human authors have littered the traditional and social media. If writing and illustrating a book is that easy — with just a few lines of prompts on ChatGPT will get you the story and a few lines in DALL-E or Midjourney can spit out the required visuals for the story — why are there still very few authors who write and publish AI-assisted books as Banc, Schickler and Reshi do? What is the magic sauce? Is the entry barrier to authoring very low with the advent of AI?
My curiosity led to a deep conversation with Banc. In several long meetings, I gently probed him — from general to the specific — to re-enact how he would re-do the Bedtime Stories book. I unpacked below what I learned about Banc and what AI is capable of for aspiring AI-assisted authors:
Prompt engineering: a game of grit and skills
Prompt engineering is an art and science of interacting with AI using languages that it understands to achieve certain goals. The bulk of the news about how AI tools can make you an instant author is totally inaccurate. What seems to be very easy eventually takes hundreds of hours, if not more, of practice and making tons of mistakes, including for Banc. He claimed how little he often slept, feeling too excited with the AI-assisted books he was writing. It is true that ChatGPT can produce some basic stories but doing it well this requires deep expertise in prompt engineering. Ask a basic or silly prompt to ChatGPT, and it will give you a content that is far from anything that resembles a book. The easy quitters thinking AI would make them authors would be totally disappointed.
Pre-prompting ChatGPT with important details will do the magic that gives you the extra mile. Examples include pre-prompting the main character(s), genre, year, location, the protagonist and antagonist, the tone, pacing, asserting your “intent” (e.g., I want to do XYX, so please give your input) and other contextual details, etc.
Iterative prompting in ChatGPT will take you to another level of magic. Examples include asking it to role play, to go crazy, DAN (or “do anything now”; a code to ask ChatGPT to break free from its rules).
Visual storyboarding: pictures that bring stories alive
If you need to create the visuals, good knowledge of visual prompting, using the language of visual artists is important. Examples include ar (aspect ratio) which is a width-to-height ratio of an image, seed which is randomly generated numbers for each image (which is important to maintain consistency when illustrating a book), composition, which positions how a visual will be shown such as headshot, wide angle, birds-eye view, etc. Emote, or using words to give emotions to visuals, such as determined, embarassed, angry, shy, will add flavor to the visuals. If you are working on emotion-less beings such as robots, adding emotes will be fun.
The great idea: being original and knowing the audience
Any author knows that having a great story idea in mind will help craft a story in a book. This great idea thinking equally applies to AI-assisted book writing process. Never assume that AI will produce everything that you need in a book. Garbage in, garbage out is the rule.
Having a great, original idea that sells — such as a lego toy that can assemble and re-assemble itself that happens upon a micro controllers and ends up building castles to house the stray animals and attract animal lovers to buy the castles then set up free shelters for all — is one of the magic sauces. Parent’s and kids will love it. If you don’t prompt ChatGPT with a great new idea, it might end up giving you a story that has been published before — which is not only boring but reduces the value of a new story book.
Stylistics: being inspired doesn’t make one a copycat
You can always use the style of certain authors as a reference. Just like any authors — such as J.K Rowling who was inspired by British mythology, Biblical themes, Shakespeare’s Macbeth story, in writing Harry Potter book series etc — most authors always have other authors who inspire them. Being inspired does not equal stealing the target author’s work. Far from it. But it gives some direction, as taste and style. AI-assisted authors use the same process; they can ask AI to tell a great story idea in mind using references to certain stylistics, such as Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Mo Willems’s Elephant and Piggie book series (one of my favorites!). You can use Harry Potter, Pip and Posy, or Marvel comics style as reference.
Tensions: the clashes that spice up all stories
Any good story books need the twist and turns, or what is also known as tensions. Without tensions, a story will feel bland and loses its ability to retain readers’ interest. The Joseph Campbells’ Hero’s Journey — where a main character (called a hero) goes out for an adventure, faces a big crisis, wins a victory and return home transformed — is one type of tension. The “struggles” that lead to a resolution is an integral part of AI-assisted story telling. A squirrel happens a gold coin and turns into a banker, a little girl’s frienship with a new AI friend leads to a life of wonder and magic, a paralyzed boy turns into a giant robot hero who saves the entire world are nice tensions for a good story.
Structure and flow: the skin that tells the flesh inside
AI can help create a table of content or chapter names for a story but its quality depends on the craftmanships of the author. It is not uncommon that an author will need to rewrite some or even most of the table of contents generated by ChatGPT. Again this depends on the pre-prompting and the iterative prompting used earlier. A good table of content should give a 10,000-feet view of the story, while not being too generic.
Expand, vary and iterate
From the chapter names churned out by ChatGPT, you can ask ChatGPT to expand the content by iteratively adding plots and sub-plots. For example, if you are writing a story about a tiny chatbot that saves the earth from AI wars where Chapter 1 is about who this tiny chatbot is, you can expand it by inserting how the robot’s love for food allows it to unite warring parties, as everyone loves delectable food (hint: the insight about “food for peace” used in conflict settlement programs), how it accidentally caught a virus that made it able to multiply new culinary ideas in nano seconds (hint: borrowing how virus replicate and be sticky to hosts), etc. Borrow the ideas from different professions or disciplines to make the plots and subplots interesting.
AI is a game changer for the wordsmiths, poets, and writers. But far from replacing authors, it only opens new doors to new ways of authorship: the AI-assisted authors — assisting authors to write stories quicker, improve on it better, and generate creative images using new skills. Storytelling skills remain precious. --
Congrats on your first post on Substack and thank you for your kind words.
PS - I love the lego monsters!