Multi-Language Children book incl. Illustration in 5 days? Yes. "The Adventures of Worm Valley" (1 of 3)

During the holidays, I used generative AI to write and illustrate a children's book in two languages - here is what I learned and, as a bonus, some scary findings. I split the article into three parts. Here is part one about the general idea and the text creation process.

I have now been officially recognized as an author. ?hmm... at least I can send someone a link from my author's profile on Amazon. But after +-5 days, I can proudly present my English and German children's book, The Adventures of Worm Valley. The book contains 50 pages and beautiful illustrations. It was done with the help of AI tools - Chat GPT from Jasper.AI and MidJourney for illustration.

Why the hell?

People familiar with me know that I am interested in fantastic stories and always enthusiastic about current technology trends. On 21 December, I read an article on Medium by Filip Soko?owski , who had done something similar and directly translated it into 10+ languages plus on top, produced an audiobook. The "job" was a good match for me because my LinkedIn network and blogs are centred around chat GPT and its various applications. Despite having followed AI and machine learning for a while, I hadn't had the opportunity to delve deeply into those topics until now. The goal was straightforward: I wanted to use the tools to write a children's book (like Filip) and see how much support they could provide for pure writing and how much creativity they could bring to the process.

Content creation process

I combined ChatGPT and Jasper

Chat GPC, or Generative Pre-training Transformer, is a state-of-the-art language processing model developed by OpenAI. It can generate human-like text based on a given prompt, making it a helpful tool for various applications, including writing and content creation.

Jasper.ai is a platform designed to help people create and interact with advanced natural language processing models. It enables users to interact in real time, allowing them to generate, refine, and develop human-like text quickly and easily. The editor mode in Jasper was perfect for rearranging and modifying the text generated by Chat GPC. Besides that, Jasper could add a tone of voice and rewrite specific passages, i.e. I tried it in the tone of J.K. Rowling.

So I plotted my story and started with an about the book, a prologue and the first chapter.

As you can observe from the screenshots and after comparing it to the final book, most of the text was used without any significant corrections. This applies to the more objective passages but also the more creative sections of the book. What doesn't work is that you tell an AI, "Write me a children's book with four characters going on adventures together and think up the first adventure." What works very well, however, is that you use individual passages such as "Write a dialogue in which a chipmunk describes a vacuum robot where he is hanging in the old oak. In the tone of JK Rowling".

In a nutshell, my plot was: Little dog Luzi is living close to a national reserve (the worm valley). Due to being the only foreign dog in the area for him, it′s tough to find friends and companions to explore the forest, river and small mountains in the area. Luzi′s owner Eva has to work a lot in her own bakery and therefore buys a vacuum cleaning robot to clean the big house. In the morning, Evas is in her bakery and therefore, she doesn't notice that something strange happens. Dusty (the vacuum cleaner robot), who is more than just a standard vacuum cleaner robot, discovers Luzi and decides to reveal himself to him with the aim of going on adventures together and discovering the world outside the house. On their forays, they get to know Mafalda and form a gang. They learn a lot about the environment, plants, other animals and secrets in Worm Valley.

By copying my paragraphs into Jasper.AI, I reaped the benefits of a collaborative interface that enabled me to edit body text quickly and also choose what type of style, tone, and keywords should be included in the full document. The simplicity of this process made it easier for me to make changes without issues or complications. The more extensive the document is, the faster Jasper will learn his own way of writing and create new sentences in a similar style. For example, when working on the Adventures of Worm Valley, it was essential to incorporate dialogues into the text. This requires using phrases like “explains Eva” or “asked Mafalda" to understand who is talking. After I got used to this structure for some time, all newly generated paragraphs automatically followed its flow without me having to adjust anything. Surprisingly, there were only a few completely misleading texts.

Crafting documents with Jasper is very easy. In the Freeform Document mode, you can utilize the "Composer" to enter a prompt in the editor, which then is executed directly by pressing CMD/CTRL + Enter. For example: “Luzy and Dusty meet Mafalda the chicken.”. This enabled me to formulate small sections according to my plotline quickly. Without ChatGPT and Jasper.AI's assistance, this process would have easily taken weeks. Unfortunately, I didn't have a precise count of the individual entries or minutes, but the fact is that after about 10 hours, a document of around 10,000 words was in my Jasper document, and I had to start shortening and correcting it.?The main usage was on the 27th of December, with a total of 4,700 generated words from Jasper in +-4 hours.

Looking back, this phase of "creating" was the most pleasant because what followed was the first English correction?and the translation into German. For the English correction, I used Grammarly This is already built into Jasper, but I had the whole text checked again to get a nice similar-sounding document. I avoided rewording as much as possible because it was supposed to be an experiment to see how good the AI is today and how fast it works in writing an entire book.

The next step, turning my work into German, was a veritable nightmare, as the corrections due to its complex grammar took extensive time. I translated the book with DeepL Pro. Deepl is not to blame here either. The translation was readable, excellent and quick - but especially the German punctuation (in which I am admittedly not good either) required much manual intervention. I had to call on my telephone joker Christian Dietz multiple times to brainstorm why this was happening. The explanation that seemed most obvious to us in the end was the use of "Write in a tone of JK Rowling style". This style often led to very " bloomy" descriptions and long nested sentences. I'm curious to see whether my former German teachers will beat me up about my first book - but again, I didn't really want to make any major corrections, so the German version is perhaps a little harder to read than the English one.?

Read in the next article how so build beautiful illustrations with an AI art generator Midjourney and the next challenges.