AI and ABCs: Crafting Culture with Code
Ever had an idea strike you so profoundly you just had to bring it to life? As a parent, these sparks often come from the little wonders our children do or say. To help my daughter manage our move from California to Washington, I started doodling picture booklets.
Our fun with these homemade creations took a new turn when she began demanding bedtime ABCs of every imaginable category, challenging my on-the-spot creativity, especially with those tricky X, Y, and Zs!
Initial success with AI
This led me to an experiment: creating a bilingual ABC book about animals using generative AI for illustrations. To my delight, ChatGPT quickly grasped the cute, bright, and colorful style I was going for. After defining the style with 'Antelope', I saved the Gen ID and prompt, streamlining the creation of the remaining illustrations with minimal tweaks.
However, not all went smoothly. The AI struggled with 'Umbrella Bird', persistently offering adorable birds with umbrellas instead of the unique hooded bird native to Central and South America. After multiple prompt adjustments, ChatGPT wouldn’t budge and it became so frustrating that I decided to replace it with "Urchin".
My daughter fell in love with the booklet immediately when she learned that mom made the book just for her. It feels touching and rewarding for me that something as simple as ABC can be so bonding.
Hitting Snags
The upcoming Lunar New Year inspired my next project, a bilingual ABC book on the festive holiday. Despite the previous success, creating this book proved more challenging. ChatGPT's unfamiliarity with concepts like 'Almond Cookie' led to a series of misinterpretations. I found that adding a recipe as a reference shaped a more accurate depiction.
However, aiming for a Chinese watercolor style revealed limitations in AI's artistic capabilities, leading to inaccurate or physically incorrect renderings for items like “Bamboo” (富贵竹), “Dumpling” (饺子), and “Firecracker” (爆竹).
The most significant hurdle was manifesting the cultural connotation and symbolism inherent in Lunar New Year traditions - welcoming new year, expelling bad luck, wishing for good fortune, family reunion, etc. Word like 'Couplet' entails writing poetic phrases and hanging the red banners with the whole family, and that proved to be too abstract for AI to accurately portray.
While there were moments of delight with genuinely appealing art, the lack of cultural context and consistency meant the AI couldn't fully meet my project's needs.
Ultimately, I reverted to traditional image editing and visual design to finalize the booklet. Families who previewed the Lunar New Year booklet shared heartwarming feedback on celebrating the cultural heritage. Their affection for the celebratory rituals and the cultural stories within them was a testament to the loving labor put into each page without AI's help. It's the human interaction that makes reading this book so much fun.
Reflections
Putting the two experiments together, here are my key takeaways:
Parents ARE children's favorite authors. Children cherish books their parents craft, no matter how simple. Never let the perceived lack of craft or tooling limit you. They want YOU!
AI opens new doors for creative expression. Despite hurdles like prompt precision and subscription fees, generative AI tools are transformative, allowing you to start creating as soon as an idea forms.
The next AI frontier requires understanding cultural contexts and universal common sense. Beyond pixel-level generation with LLM and improving diversity and inclusion of the training data set (AI is Not Meant to be Sexist), we need advancements like Yann LeCun's proposed Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) to develop machines that grasp the nuances of the world order, human traditions and logic - the common sense of how firecrackers and chopsticks work.
If you're curious to experiment with AI in your creative projects, check out the tools I've developed:
Story Genie GPT: Empower your storytelling and become your child's favorite author.
Coloring Genie GPT: Create personalized coloring pages for endless fun.
For those of you wanting to explore the Lunar New Year traditions, check out this bilingual ABC booklet on Amazon. It's included in the Kindle Unlimited subscription, and you can download a PDF version here. Let me know what you think, and happy Year of the Dragon!
