A man's post about creating a children's book with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has divided the internet. The user Ammaar Reshi posed happily with the book cover and even gave details of how he created the entire book over the weekend. But social media has accused Mr Reshi of using "stolen" images to create the AI-generated art. In a follow-up Twitter thread, Mr Reshi has called for a debate or discussion around the method he used to create the book, but slammed the "anger and negativity" around it.
In a Twitter thread posted on Saturday, Mr Reshi said, "I spent the weekend playing with ChatGPT, MidJourney, and other AI tools... and by combining all of them, published a children's book co-written and illustrated by AI!"
The user is seen posing happily with the AI art he created. He then described the process of publishing the book.
"First, the idea: I wanted a story showing the magic of AI to children. I gave ChatGPT a prompt and went back and forth with it to refine details and get inspiration for the illustrations. It was like having a constant brainstorming partner who I could ping pong ideas off of," Mr Reshi said in one of his tweets.
"Then, I took those ideas to MidJourney and gave it prompt after prompt till I could get a somewhat consistent style. This took a few hours but it was such a fun process playing with all the different styles!" he added.
The user then combined all the elements and put them together in a book format and signed up on Amazon Kindle Publishing. The AI also helped him create the book cover.
However, his efforts were not taken very kindly by other Twitter users.
"I have a genuine question: do you get personal satisfaction from any of this? Like on a creative level, do you feel pride or joy from bringing an idea to life? Or is it simply the novelty of "playing" over the weekend to make a product you can sell with minimal effort involved?" asked one of the users.
In his reply, Mr Reshi said, "Genuinely wanted to see how the tech could be combined together. I'm even donating the books. This isn't about the money for me. I do think it's sparked an incredibly important discussion though. Just wish it was more civil on both sides."
"I can't... I am working 60 hours a week writing, editing and illustrating my book while people like this just ruin the industry with low quality STOLEN illustrations and poor writing," said another user.
"Children deserve better than badly cobbled together STOLEN art and words. This is such a soulless cash grab," a third users commented.
