''Alice and Sparkle'' is a 2022 illustrated children's book published by American technology product designer Ammaar Reshi. Reshi created the book using artificial intelligence programs

ChatGPT ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and ...

and Midjourney in one weekend, which sparked controversy among artists, both in regard to the

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

status of the book and the quality of the illustration and text.

Plot

A girl named Alice discovers a group of magical and benevolent

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

beings. She knows that artificial intelligence is powerful, and that it has the power to do good and evil depending on how it is used. One day, she creates her own artificial intelligence and names it Sparkle. Sparkle helps Alice with her homework and plays with her, and they quickly become good friends. However, Sparkle soon grows more powerful and begins to make its own decisions, which makes Alice both proud and scared. She knows that it is her responsibility to guide Sparkle to do good, not evil. Together, Alice and Sparkle use their knowledge to make the world a better place and to teach people about the power of artificial intelligence. The two live happily ever after, spreading the magic of artificial intelligence.

Structure

Including the

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and

postscript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

, the book contains twenty four pages, with about being illustrations provided by Midjourney. The very short story, composed of text generated by

, contains 343 words. Some of the illustrations are accompanied by descriptions, at least one of which was provided by Reshi. Both Alice's and Sparkle's appearances change significantly between illustrations, although Alice's is more consistent. Reshi said Midjourney was unable to generate consistent images of Sparkle, so he had to include a line in the book saying that it could turn "into all kinds of robot shapes".

Creation

When reading a children's book to his friend's daughter, Ammaar Reshi "decided he wanted to write his own". He had no experience with creative writing or illustration, so instead used the chatbot

to write the story for him and used the image generation software Midjourney to illustrate it. On December 4, 2022, 72 hours after having the idea for the book, he published it on

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's digital bookstore, and published a paperback version the following day.

Controversy

On December 9, 2022, Reshi made a thread on

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about his experience publishing the book, which soon went viral. Reshi received heavy backlash from artists with concerns over the ethics of art generated by artificial intelligence. He also received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm because of his publication. Many writers and illustrators criticized both the creation process and the product itself, claiming that if artificial intelligence programs such as Midjourney are trained on existing illustrations, then the original artists should be financially compensated for derivative works such as ''Alice and Sparkle''. The book was temporarily removed from Amazon in January 2023 because of "suspicious review activity", caused by a high volume of both five-star and one-star reviews.

References

{{reflist 2022 children's books Artificial intelligence art Text-to-image generation Literature controversies Books involved in plagiarism controversies Fiction about robots

Plot

Structure

Creation

Controversy

See also

References