Show HN: Create a Children's book with AI – with illustrations

[jaszczw]

Hey together with wife we took part in AssemblyAI hackathon and although we didn't win we felt good enough about our inital MVP that we took it a bit further.

You can describe your characters and give a title and however long/detailed description you want, the gpt-3 will generate a children's story from it, dall-e will generate images. Images are postprocessed with stable-diffusion custom model (for stylisation) and that's the final result.

It's still early as it was done in about 2 weeks, but I count on your feedback.

I am software engineer and did basically all of the engineering work myself.

Feel free to ask question regarding implementation plans, etc. cannot wait to learn what you think. I'll appriciate any feedback.

[solardev]

I went through the process and then hit the paywall... "you must pay first before you can generate the book."

Maybe show a short preview page/chapter for free, based on the real character and prompt? Hard to pay for something when you have no idea what you're getting, or the quality of it.

Other than that, the process was pretty straightforward and simple! Minor quibble: Maybe make the form fields clearer, like what they influence (is the title important?), and which are optional or vs required. The gender/age/hair color etc. had dark grey backgrounds for me and I wasn't sure what that meant.

[jaszczw]

Thanks again for the feedback - since your message I added a clear message first book for free and first you need to login with verified email to progress. Hope that makes it more user friendly :)

[jaszczw]

Hey thanks for the feedback! We were thinking about that, but as the generation is quite time consuming we had not started it before payment, will think about making the process better for customer.

At the bottom of landing page there are examples: https://www.childbook.ai/book/clbxjxxjp0000mq08xtavb4b9

If you still have the link, I've moved forward the book for you

[solardev]

Hah, thanks! The finished output was rather enjoyable (if a bit silly throughout, as a children's book ought to be!), with a happy ending too.

Some more feedback:

1) I don't know if this is possible, but can you ask the upstream generators to try to maintain a consistent image style between pages? The different look and feel page to page can be a little jarring

2) Similarly, I don't suppose there's a way to keep the look of each character consistent through the story? It's not always clear who's who, from page to page. The examples have a single character, and it's able to maintain the same hair and clothing style, but with multiple characters it's hard to keep track of who's who.

3) An on-page "regenerate image" (perhaps with an additional prompt?) might be helpful to further fix up some of the trippier images

4) Can the payment model accommodate longer stories? Like if I wanted to pay more for a 50-page book with more details and dialogue, etc.?

Overall though, this is a great synthesis of upstream AI producers and I'm excited to see how it develops! A book like this might make a fun gift for some of the kids in my life... thanks for the demo :)

[jaszczw]

1) The style consistency is the easiest to achieve and we are much better at looking back 2 weeks ago on our MVP https://devpost.com/software/children-s-book-illustrator?ref...

2) Character consistency is a much harder topic but we have couple of ideas, either dreambooth for each combination of hair/age/color etc. and or layering and rendering one character at a time then layering them over an image should give much more stable characters.

3) Regenerate - we were thinkin on a button for the whole book, so that you can regenerate it if it's not to your liking up to N times. With illustrations we were thinking to first add 3-4 versions of your illustrations that you can review and set which is best and as a next step regeneration.

4) Current payment model was just a test if anyone would be willing to pay for the book. We were thinking subscription and N chapters per tier, so that you can generate like a 100 chapters a week. And how you want to spend it it's your choice.

----

I work full-time so this is side-project done in two weeks, it's far from what it could be but I am still happy that I've got something working and at least someone finds enjoyable.

[gremlinsinc]

What I'd like is to just have a service where I can self-publish books, that can be bought. Ideally I could just upload images from stable diffusion, and text blurbs per image from chatGPT.

I wrote a really good, eh.. I was given a good story from ai that would be a great children's book but I couldn't find any decent ways to self-publish.

[jaszczw]

So like a market place for self publishing? Like an Etsy but for AI generated "stuff".

[jaszczw]

https://www.childbook.ai/book/clbzfp3cb0000jv08sevyez63 - the book

[jaszczw]

I've just pushed a change where inputs are consistent - it was light vs dark scheme thing as I use light scheme.

Also I have added small info paragraph before title and description so it's more clear what it does.

[llagerlof]

Yeah, that sucks. And the devs asks for the e-mail BEFORE the paywall. It's not an honest attitude.

[jaszczw]

I am sorry you feel this way, I added pay what you want messagesin every button to make it clear, but ill try to rethink if I can do it in a better way. Its kind of hard to know if someone would be willing to pay for the generated books. We didn't had any other ideas how to test that out.

[jaszczw]

Do you think that paywalling, after seeing cover and first page would be more honest/acceptable? Or maybe we should give some free generations after email confirmation. It certainly something we will be thinking through as we don't want anyone to feel we are being dishonest.

[shyn3]

If you are going to charge, notify the person before they spend the effort. I think.

The pay what you want seems cool.

I have a story like but needs images. I think that's the value add.

[jaszczw]

I've just added a first book for free on validating email. Hope that will help :) Thanks for all the feedback so far.

Also here is a link to youtube video of the app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXuzWrOhBPk

[gardenhedge]

Awesome - I had a similar idea to create this product. Your execution looks great. Well done.

[jaszczw]

Thanks,there is already couple of similar products so a lot will depend on the proper priorities and speed of iterations.