I’m working on my first children picture book. I’d never fancied myself a writer or an illustrator. The idea to publish children books was dead simple though. I’d accumulated over 150 recordings of stories that I had told my kids over the course of seven years. I’d been thinking of publishing them before but I’d struggled with translation into English and adding illustrations. About half a year ago I thought why not use AI to delegate both of these tasks.
So I put all of the recordings into one place, built a pipeline to automatically transcribe them and got over a hundred transcriptions to work on. It took me maybe a week, mostly to find all of the recordings and build scripts with help of AI for the pipeline. It looked as if I was a couple of days to publishing my first book. That was about five months ago now.
I started working on the first story. I tried ChatGPT to translate the story in one go, and I didn’t like the result. Maybe 80% of the story was good, but the rest of it was spoiled. ChatGPT removed all nuances of the story, all small details that made my kids laugh as crazy. The version I got from it was smooth, perfectly correct, but absolutely generic. I wouldn’t read it to my kids, or they wouldn’t listen and enjoy it either. So I needed to do the translation stage differently.
I came up with a smart plan to translate the story myself, a couple of paragraphs at a time, and check it against ChatGPT. I was extremely worried that I will use odd language in the children stories because English wasn’t my native language.
The plan went well, I gained a lot of insights into how English in children literature works. But the process was excruciating and very slow. I could only translate about 100 words in an hour session. Having spent about three months on this activity, I had translated one and a half story out of the two for the first book. I also started to loathe the process, avoiding it as much as possible. I couldn’t continue that way because no amount of willpower could make me finish it. “Why won’t you just write the story from scratch based on the storyline?” asked my wife one day. So I decided to go wild and just trust myself.
I made an outline from the recording and started writing. I finished the remaining half of the story in three days. I wrote it by hand to keep myself concentrated on the story instead of perfecting it digitally. Then I used ChatGPT again but now to turn my handwriting into the digital form and make basic edits. This was just the right task for the tool in my case.
ChatGPT made a few suggestions, but overall my manuscript looked good… to me at least. So I was happy to find a faster way to “translating” my stories, and I expected to publish the book within a couple of days from having the edited text on hand.
Creating illustrations shouldn’t be that hard, right? There are no little details like in texts, they are just that, illustrations. AI will do it well, for sure.
Remember, I’m a former developer who had been very far from anything creative. So I believed in that idea of how easy it must be to create illustrations. I talked to ChatGPT about it and realized how much naive I had been. So it’s been another couple of months that I’m working on the illustrations. But I’ll tell you about it in a following post.
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