From "I was shocked: my husband was using AI to write our children’s bedtime stories/I was impressed as his stories grew ever more inventive and responsive to our kids’ demands. Then I learned his secret" by Sophie Brickman (The Guardian).
Are AI books better because they can include whatever elements the child — with her limited real-world associations — comes up with? Why wouldn't it work just as well to invent your own story with those elements? The daughter in question asked for a funny story about "mowing lawns in a place called Bananaland, and a festival, and monkeys." It's not hard to make up this story on your own, but you may be interested, for a few minutes, in how AI might do it. But is this the new way to do bedroom stories? I think a child is more likely to respond to a story told spontaneously, from an active human mind connected to the voice. Brickman does not disagree.
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Two generations of girls - daughters, grand daughters, nieces and great nieces - have thrilled to my stories of Rainbow the Magic Pony and the accompanying coloring book I illustrated back in the mid 1980's. I always meant to update it to a darker teenage angst graphic novel but never did.
I think a child is more likely to respond to a story told spontaneously, from an active human mind connected to the voice. Brickman does not disagree.
I disagree. Kids just want results. Sounds more like neither of you want to lose your relevance to AI...
I once mentioned an article I was writing on packaging design to my son. 15 minutes later he sent me an article that was what I would consider a pretty good first draft. He did it with AI. I could have edited it, added a bit of my secret sauce, and submitted it for publication and payment.
I am currently writing a biographical book and have experimented with AI to write a couple chapters. I ask for 1,000 words of personal bio, 1,000 words of company history and 25 trivia questions and answers about company and 25 more about the person.
I combine, distill and edit the results into a 1200 word chapter. The trivia gives me some "Did you know..." sidebars and pulls.
I can see AI as completely transforming the way I write professionally.
I like the idea of bedtime stories. That is very innovative and very creative. I can see how it might iterate over time into a very complex and imaginative story. For example, a fox runs across the field in a way that is merely incidental. But a week later, the daughter asks what happened to the fox? AI can generate a whole thread about where the fox came from, where it went, what it was doing and so on.
I can see a simple story for a 4 year old that grows and complexifies and matures with the daughter.
John Henry
Now if you want creativity attached to an active human mind, listen to the stories of what counts as 'working in venture capital'...
Althouse:
Are AI books better because they can include whatever elements the child — with her limited real-world associations — comes up with?
Only if you're too damn dumb to do as Althouse suggests, make one up yourself that includes elements the child comes up with.
Having listened to my daughter's and other kid's 'elements' and ideas, I disagree that a kid's associations are limited to the real-world at all. I've not met a little kid that doesn't enjoy Dr. Suesse.
I teach about arts and crafts.
An artist is someone with a creative bent. For example, Irving Berlin was a great artist creating hundreds of timeless songs like White Christmas. But he was not a craftsman. He could not sing and could barely play a piano.
Bing Crosby, to stay with White Christmas, was a great craftsman. He could take a tune like White Christmas and make it beautiful.
It is not black and white, of course. Lots of overlap between the art and the craft and other people, like arrangers, publishers, musicians etc involved.
AI, it seems to me, leaves much of the creativity of writing to the artist who can come up with the idea for the storyline "Write me a 10,000 word story for a 5 year old about a fox that discovers a golden egg" the artist can then focus on the art and leave the craft to the computer.
I think AI is way overhyped (again, it was over hyped in the 80s and in the 60s as well) But ti does have a lot of interesting possibilities.
John Henry
Soon, Westerners will give up thinking altogether. As things are going we may be better off for it.
Good grief. My husband did this twenty years ago with our kids. It gets better the more you do it, and it was an opportunity to be silly and creative that never presented itself otherwise. Our four loved it, and still laugh about the stories. It’s not hard. Technology doesn’t need to do everything, and it doesn’t even make things better every time.
It doesn’t take “bandwidth,” either. If snuggling into bed with your littles for a story at the end of the day isn’t a highlight, you’re doing it wrong.
My daughter, beginning about age five, used to tell us what she wanted in her stories that we’d make up. For example: “Make it scary, but not too scary, with both good and bad monsters and people, and put the scary parts in the beginning, middle, and end, and have a happy ending.”
We complied, because neither of us grew up with tv screens embedded in the headrests of our parents’ cars to keep us occupied on drives, or later with tablets and phones that would keep us from using our own imaginations during downtime.
I tremble for our civilization when AI is the sole entity capable of showing any imagination.
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of creating a story spontaneously.
The point of automation was to free up time for us to do these creative things.
"... who spends her days cheerfully whipping up delicious meals of roasted penguin and being praised for her frugality and Christian values."
No wonder the kid wants dad to read the bedtime stories. Or create them from scratch. Mom's imagination isn't fun or honest, the two things children praise in a tale. If AI can meet the basics, as opposed to mom who pushes her bubble-driven agenda, then it's all good.
What AI is producing is not alien really but is the output of a kind of collective 'hive mind'. Chat GPT ingests and incorporates an extraordinarily broad collection of human knowledge (and stories!) and then uses all of that to generate responses to queries.
In the future, Harvard presidents will load their academic papers with AI nonsense.
Blogger stlcdr said...
The point of automation was to free up time for us to do these creative things.
Amen to that.
Kind of what I was trying to say but much better put. Pretty much what I have spent my life helping people do withj automation in manufacturing.
John Henry
It's not hard to make up this story on your own
That is disputable, and perhaps our host has already forgotten how poorly so many students and other people do with "creative writing" tasks. But then there is the time issue. If I recall correctly it takes AI about 30 seconds to generate text that, even if one is creative and ready to put pen to paper (metaphorically speaking), is impossible to beat.
However the most fascinating part of the excerpt Althouse dished out was when the wife allows her mind to contemplate Rosemary's Baby or an "ex-wife hidden in a closet" before taking the super-reasonable step of simply asking her husband how the stories were being written. This is entirely consistent with the outrageous lengths my wife's imagination will go to before she thinks to ask me about some fact puzzling her, like a charge on a statement or the appearance of an object she hadn't seen before. And that's all I will say about that.
And then Tom T. comes along and says it in less than a dozen words. Bravo!
I must add that "whipping up delicious meals of roasted penguin" would have absolutely horrified me as a child. What's next, kitten stew? Koala jerky? Pooh Bear honey-roasted ribs?
“I disagree. Kids just want results. Sounds more like neither of you want to lose your relevance to AI...“
With all due respect - take that as you will - I’m certainly glad you weren’t my parent.
- Rafe
I especially liked the tone that suggested that her venture capital husband lacked her imagination, and therefore wasn't a "creative" like her - followed by her panic at the realization that what imagination he appeared to have entertained and pleased their daughter in ways that hers did not. (And then to discover that what what was actually happening was that his imagination led him to a use of AI that she never imagined - gold!) (And further - that AI could write a story she couldn't write!) (And more - that, before she knew the stories were AI, she was panicking because she thought that her husband was a better and more creative storyteller than she was - but it was AI all along! How good a writer is she, really?)
For Christmas this year, we had all three of our kids with us visiting family. Our habit when we're traveling at Christmas is to do "hotel Christmas," which means everyone is assigned one person for whom to fill a stocking and get one other gift, with a $50 limit. This year we added a wrinkle: you had to get ChatGPT to write your person a Christmas card, preferably funny. My son drew my name for the gifts, and his card was a Christmas rap in the style of the Beastie Boys. Awesome! I mean, it was a terrible rap, but it was hilarious. Apparently I am the illest chap.
Plagiarizing from a post of mine elsewhere...
A fortuitous discussion as the difference 'twixt us and AI was demonstrated to me this morning by accident.
I visit my neighbor most mornings and today Joe was there. Joe was rummaging around for the TV remote and Curt suddenly burst out in "What you want? Baby, I got it. ..."
Until consciousness is achieved, AI will never be more than a response mechanism. It would never have had the "inspiration" to leap from the visual of Joe searching for the remote (or even knowing it was the remote being searched for as nothing was said) to Aretha singing. What experience could it have had to make those connections?
It would have to be prompted sufficiently.
And, carrying the example even further, an AI wouldn't have noticed that the episode was an argument against it's own intelligence.
1. Dear Penthouse
2. Friend's mom
3. Car washing
4. Hot summer day
Go!
Humanity dissociative disorder... keep mom and dad socialized and taxable.
I think a child is more likely to respond to a story told spontaneously, from an active human mind connected to the voice.
How about a robot that turns into a bug?
You cannot spell AI without CIA.
Watched an animated movie, last night: Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas.
There is a scene where the child wants a bed-time story (dinosaurs, again, of course). The father gets an iPad-like device and sets it up. It has a video of him reading the bed time story.
When a child wants a bed-time story, is it not also the contact and spontaneity of human interaction between parent and child, adult and infant, experienced as novice? Doesn't the parent gain something in return, the challenge to the mind that comes with telling a story?
With all due respect - take that as you will - I’m certainly glad you weren’t my parent.
Me too…
Further:
How many parents put their children's 'artwork' on the refrigerator? What purpose does it serve? Is it even 'art'?
Should said child bring home a picture [created by AI] with the prompt 'a christmas donut' would that be refrigerator-worthy?
Just put the kid's iPhone on the nightstand, have it 'read' a generated story and continue drinking.
madAsHell:
In the future, Harvard presidents will load their academic papers with AI nonsense.
The future is now, my friend.
I think a child is more likely to respond to a story told spontaneously, from an active human mind connected to the voice. Brickman does not disagree.
I think a child is more likely to respond to a story read from a book -- especially (in my experience) if it is one he/she has heard dozens of times before. Most likely if the Mom or Dad in question has had a hard day at the office and has a number of work-related emails requiring attention.
I would start a favorite story only to go off-script at some point. This made my daughters hyper-focused on the story and whether I was telling it "right".
They soon knew it word-for-word in order to catch Dad, at which point I turned the storytelling over to them so they could begin connecting the words on the page with the story in their heads.
Save the AI stories to read to the wife at bedtime.
The important thing by a factor of infinity is the Dad reading to the kid. The text is insightful compared to the human contact. I would read inane kid books over and over until they memorized every word. Then I would start making things up twisting the story like Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch. They would immediately stop me and correct where I went off the rails. Neither Jesus Buddha nor Odin could break those bonds made reading nonsense.
@Joe Smith:
Here's ChatGPT+'s response to your prompt:
"It seems you're looking for a scenario involving a letter to a magazine, a friend's mom, car washing, and a hot summer day. Let's craft an imaginative scene with these elements:
"Imagine a young adult writing a letter to their favorite magazine, "Penthouse," describing a vivid summer experience. It's a hot summer day, and they're helping their friend's mom wash her car. The scene is set in a suburban driveway, with the sun shining brightly and the sound of water splashing. The friend's mom, a kind and friendly figure, is wearing casual summer clothes, and they both have a good time chatting and laughing while washing the car. The letter describes the warmth of the sun, the coolness of the water, and the joy of simple, shared moments on a summer day.
"Let's create an image to visualize this scenario."
Then there's a picture from Dall-E. It's of a nice kid and a casually dressed bougie mom smiling and washing a car.
The LLM guanaco uncensored 13B q_5_k_m gguf (locally hosted) returns:
"Dearest Penthouse,
"As a friend's mother walked by the car wash on that hot summer day I couldn't help but wonder what life would be like with her in mind. The car was going round and round as it always does. Then a light shone upon us from above and she looked up at me as if to say "I want you". She had such a lovely smile and the way she talked about how much she wanted my big dick really got me thinking of all those wonderful things we could do together! After she told me that her husband would never find out I thought, 'What have I been waiting for?' The next thing I knew we were in bed making love like two crazed animals. We must be the luckiest couple alive because nothing has ever felt this good before!"
"The car was going round and round as it always does." That's pretty great.
Wonderful, a new child indoctrination tool.
Ray Bradbury was prescient in "The Electric Grandmother" . . . how a machine could fill the absence of a parent. In the story absent because of death. In the current article absent because the parent has voluntarily chosen to let her time with her children be killed by career choice.
Jamie said: “she was panicking because she thought that her husband was a better and more creative storyteller than she was - but it was AI all along! How good a writer is she, really?)”
I’ve seen this dynamic play out especially among divorced parents.
After all, during the first couple of years Mommy is much more important in a child’s eyes than Daddy is. Then the child starts to develop an affection and sometimes a preference (I don’t mean a constant preference, just from time to time) for the father. There are moms who just can’t cope with that and they start to subtly - and then not so subtly - undermine the father.
rehajm said...
"I disagree. Kids just want results. Sounds more like neither of you want to lose your relevance to AI..."
I disagree. Kids want attention and love from real human beings. What you are doing by using AI to write the children's stories is fooling your child with a substandard product.
Plus passing off work as yours that you didn't write is unethical. (Unless you're the President of Harvard.)
Reading the comments here, it's disturbing that so many people have convinced themselves that it's not really plagiarism if they're stealing from an AI without giving the AI proper attribution.
"Me too…"
You couldn't have handled me: I was too curious, too smart, and had an expectation of more from my father and mother than placating transactionalism.
Both of my adult offspring told me that they learned growing up with me that people lie, and better yet, how to tell when people were lying. Me, that is. Me lying. I suppose this may have resulted from my bedtime stories, adapted freely from Asimov crossed with Seuss, or from the stories I told them repeatedly about their misbehaving older brother who was sold off to medical researchers for being so bad, or from my insistance that the "g" in STOP SIGN was not silent. All I know is that I can't slip anything past them now, not even a little fib about my current weight and slow progress dieting. They could both be carnie barkers for the "guess your weight" booth.
Then again, when I tell them the local Gray Foxes have been climbing the backyard trees, or that I saw a Crested Caracara in our neighborhood, they can also tell I am NOT lying, even about such unlikely events. I appreciate both aspects of them listening to me closely while they were growing up.
Computer generated fiction lacks only one thing to make great kids' literature, and that is a novel style for the illustrations. I'm sure someday soon they will combine the two, crazy stories and even crazier pics. I, for one, look forward to reading, "Why Robot Overlords Conquered The Earth" in its first edition, perhaps autographed by the author-bot and illustrations signed by the artist-bot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfAHbm7G2R0
At one point, my entire family could do the whole Tweedle Beetle Battle from Fox in Sox. Sure, an AI can do so, too, but can it do it while jumping up and down on the bed after brushing its teeth?
Martin Gardner, American mathematician, wrote a column for back page of Scientific American for many years. He'd put in math puzzles and stories. One story he wrote was about a Dad who asked his genius son what the kid wanted for Christmas, and was told "an internally ambiguous yet self-serving statement." On Christmas morning, the gifts were opened, and when the son asked if Dad found the requested gift, Dad replied, "I don't know if I have or haven't."
The son smiled, and replied, "Thanks, Dad!"
"Me too…"
You couldn't have handled me: I was too curious, too smart, and had an expectation of more from my father and mother than placating transactionalism.
Now you- you sound like my offspring- haha…
"When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and learn from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind."
-Sister Becca The Finite
: )
Example #9035768 of a (likely) feminist demanding a man perform a traditionally female duty, and then being pissed that he can do it as well as she can.
Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights isn't supposed to be a goal we're to try and match. Most people can't assemble a good story about where they were last night. How about we give kind and decent people who want to entertain and bond with their children (and who can't call a story up out of their heads on demand) a break?
And Howard has it dead right - the important factor *to the child* is dad is reading the story, whether original* or the thousandth reading of the same, it is the kid, settling down, and a parent saying goodnight, sweet dreams.
*yeah, come up with something that does not crib off of every other story you read, heard, or saw.
@Rocketeer - you have clearly "been" a child, but have you ever raised a child? Placating transactionalism is mastered by the average parent by the child's fourth birthday. Chaos rules without it.
I agree with Oligonciella. The future IS now. There will be grave societal disruption as the use of AI is integrated into society. Professors may need to give assignments REQUIRING the use of AI, but also requiring three original sentences in summary. Plus citations including the precise AI requests used. I will be impressed when AI breaks out of the realm of collective human knowledge and does something original, like create a non-invasive cure for prostate cancer or learn how to talk to whales. It can access everything we know, presumably, but I bet it can't break out of that envelope.
A further comment - children are fine with complex stories as well. I read the Lord of the Rings triology aloud twice, plus Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples. My kids grew up literate and morally grounded.
A further comment - children are fine with complex stories as well. I read the Lord of the Rings triology aloud twice, plus Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples. My kids grew up literate and morally grounded.
Wasn't it just simpler to set the kid in front of the TV?
Go look up the cover photo of The Tubes album Remote Control. Nipple included.
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