AI-generated book receives criticism on the internet

28-year-old Ammaar Reshi, a design manager at the fintech company Brex, has recently created a children's book titled Alice and Sparkle using artificial intelligence. 

Raised in Pakistan before his family moved to the UK, where he studied computer science at King's College, London, Reshi came up with the idea to create the book for his best-friend's child earlier this month when he started exploring the possibilities with AI generated tools. 

Using the tool ChatGPT, he created the story of a little girl named Alice and a robot named Sparkle who explore the frontiers of science and technology together. Reshi then used the AI app Midjourney to create the illustrations for his children's book.

While his initial idea was to create a book for his close ones, Reshi published the book using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing after being approached by multiple friends who asked if they could buy the book from him.

Read more

Enter 'Alphabetica': Vowels form a unique minority in Roy Phoenix’s satire

However, upon posting about his AI generated book on Twitter, he received a less favourable response from the internet. 

Many users criticised him for automating the process at the expense of human creativity and how this might cause children's story writers and illustrators to be driven out of jobs. Many also pointed out to the fact that there was no transparency as to how the AI tools were trained to produce such illustrations, which means that there is a possibility of them using pirated artwork to train the tools. This means that many of the artists' works may be used without their consent or credit. 

According to Reshi, some of the criticisms have boiled over to death threats as well as messages encouraging self-harm. Regretting how he has become a victim of cyberbullying, he has since admitted that platforms like OpenAI need to be transparent about the information their data are trained on.