Three Little Pigs by AI

Two Epic Proportion Floods are predicted in the publishing industry. Artificial Intelligence has discovered writing and illustrating. At the present time I am post-critique editing a spin off of the Three Little Pigs so I scoped out the “competition.”

Writing

CHATGPT (ChatGPT: The Most Advanced AI Chatbot in 2022​) will write anything from paragraphs to term papers. It is free and easy to use. I asked for “a story that was a twist on Three Little Pigs.”

Once upon a time, the three little pigs were each building their houses as usual. The first pig built his house out of straw, the second pig built his house out of sticks, and the third pig built his house out of bricks. However, this time, instead of a big, bad wolf coming to blow down their houses, a group of hungry bears came along. The bears sniffed around the straw house and were able to easily knock it down, causing the first pig to flee to the second pig’s stick house. The bears were also able to knock down the stick house with ease, causing the two pigs to flee to the brick house. The brick house was too strong for the bears to knock down, so the three little pigs were safe.

Hmmmm.

I then requested a “rhyming text of the first pig building a straw house.”

Once there was a little pig

Who wanted to build a house that was big

He found some straw that was bright and yellow

And began building with a great deal of mellow

He worked and worked, from dawn till dusk

Until his little house was built on a husk

He stood back and admired what he’d done

Proud of the straw house he’d won

Nonononononono!

Illustrating

Midjourney (https://www.midjourney.com/) is a little trickier to navigate. After several attempts I did get “Three Pigs in a brick house.”

Passable. They are pigs.

I could ask for any of those drawings to be refined – for example putting the pigs in tux or tutus. When I tried to add the wolf, the AI went in its own direction and did not produce a kids’ illustration.

Tidal Wave

The dire prediction is that the book market will be tsunami-ed with these AI creations which are approaching tolerable writing and illustrations and can be produced and self-published very cheaply. Certainly, if you need cover art for a novel, this will be a cheap alternative to paying for an illustration used only once.

At present it is cumbersome to get a set of pictures using the same characters going through different scenes and situations as would be needed in a picture book.

Lifeboats yet?

AI produces exactly what is asked for and if I kept working with either program, I might have refined a finished product, but there is not yet the spark of life that human produced art and writing gives. I suspect before AI becomes accomplished, publishers will have a program to determine if a submission is AI or human generated (as academics do now to detect plagiarism).

Just keep swimming…

What this means to us as human producers is that our quality has to be so innovative, so creative and imaginative that no one would suspect it was done by a robot!

Thanks to Cyle Young (CyleYoung.com) for the early heads up on this trend!

Multi-award-winning author Robin Currie learned story sharing by sitting on the floor, during library story times. She has sold 1.7 M copies of her 40 storybooks and writes stories to read and read again! Robin is happy to note How to Dress a Dinosaur found its unique spot on the publisher’s list!