Ammaar Reshi AI engineer , 28, has loved technology ever since he was a young boy. He added, “I was always intrigued, and when I was five years old, my dad let me play on his computer.” Prior to his family moving to the UK, where Reshi studied computer science in London, he was raised in Pakistan. Reshi moved to Palo Alto, California, for a job with Palantir Technologies. He has worked at the finance business Brex since 2020 and is currently the design manager there.
Reshi started experimenting with the plethora of generative AI bot tools that started to appear on the market in recent months. He had the notion earlier this month to use AI bot to create a book for the child of his best pals, who was born this year. He remembered, “I said I was going to attempt to take a weekend to put this out there.
First, Reshi created a story using ChatGPT about Alice, a young girl who is interested in learning about technology, and Sparkle, an adorable robot who assists her. Reshi stated, “That provided me a foundation for a tale.” It was fine. Yes, it has its problems. I then began adjusting it.
He asked ChatGPT to increase Sparkle’s self-awareness and Alice’s curiosity. The desired photos were then produced by Reshi using the AI bot app Midjourney. He continued, “I just started inserting suggestions like ‘young girl’ and some descriptors: ‘blue eyes,”simple clothes,’ ‘enthusiastic,’ ‘interested. “That produced some outcomes. Let me just say that some of those outcomes were completely absurd. If I had included those early images, it would have turned into a horror novel.
He spent hours fine-tuning the Midjourney questions, estimating that he discarded “hundreds” of pictures before selecting the 13 that make up the book’s 14 pages. I don’t know if it’s possible, so I almost gave up, but in the end, I just pushed through, he said.
Just 72 hours after originally coming up with the concept, Reshi submitted the finished product to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which published Alice and Sparkle on Amazon on December 4th. Reshi initially simply wanted to create the book for the child of one of his friends. But when he announced on Instagram that he had used artificial intelligence to write a book, more of his friends started to inquire about purchasing it. (He claimed that so far, he has sold more than 70 volumes and given away between “40 and 45.”)
Others urged him to broadcast the release’s news more widely. People, including children’s book illustrators, condemned Reshi for automating the process at the expense of human creativity when he tweeted about the book.
Anupa Roper, a UK-based children’s book author, called Reshi’s tweet “disgusting” and claimed it gave her a “sinking feeling in the bottom of [her] stomach.” I ask myself, “Is it really so simple to produce something that required my heart and soul?” stated Roper.
Josie Dom, a fellow British children’s author, declined to download Reshi’s book. Because he didn’t truly put much labour into the book, she felt he didn’t deserve to profit financially from it. Dom stated that she is “concerned that the use of AI Bot in creating stories would cause a proliferation of poor-quality stories, both on the writing and the illustration side” based on seeing the sample pages on Amazon.