AI – What’s this got to do with Children's books?

 

Find a comfy spot, I think this one is long. 

My children ask a lot of questions, really good ones and I love it. Some of them are hard to answer in a way that children can understand. Some of those questions I’m still debating the right approach like “How did Ruby get over the rainbow bridge and why can’t we go see her?” Most of their questions apply to our surroundings or the few things they understand I do. Sitting in front of a computer is the least interesting to them but they love to ask questions about the big white truck I drive with the lights and sirens. I’d prefer to answer questions about where lightning comes from or why slugs are slimy, but I can only do my best to address the cascading thought process of a child’s mind. It’s a data set that I’d like to populate with only happy thoughts. Not all questions have happy answers. I do my best to impart as much knowledge of not only how to ask questions, but also how to find answers.

How do I approach that in a short drive to school drop off? I make up stories.

Why did that house catch fire daddy? Is our house going to catch fire? Did those people get hurt when their car flipped over? What happens when they get to the hospital and the doctor gives them the Band-Aids?

These situations are tough on me. Doing what needs to get done comes naturally but there is residual trauma. HIPAA limits conversations and details. There is a small community and time available to debrief. The rest sits in your head.

My children give me a happy outlet to explain through stories the heroes I encounter daily. After repeated stories to my children, especially Vincent, I decided to write them down so maybe I can be consistent or have diverse material. I began writing a children’s book series that ended up begin called “Vinny and the Brave Helpers”.

I started writing about Police, Fire, EMS, Mountain Rescue, LifeFlight, K9, and other emergency services. It allowed me to document the life of these local heroes which I based on people I have the pleasure of spending my spare time with. I made characters and developed simple stories for children to understand why these roles are important. I wanted to provide value to each of the 13 story books so I added “adult content” to each. Some examples are “Emergency Preparedness Checklist”, “Medical information cards for family members and first responders”, “Outdoor safety tips” etc.

“Seems like a lot of talk about Children’s books and not much about Tech Dan… what’s this got to do with AI?”

Ok back into the rabbit hole.

Generated with AI. 

Moving away from stock trading, crypto, DEX, and FLOPs we will move into the following:

Amazon KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing
Canva
PhotoToCartoon
Mayo Studio
PicSo
Jasper Art
Dall-E
Stable Diffusion
DreamBooth

Then: Custom checkpoints, training models, Epochs, hypernetwork, preprocess, Lora, Inpaint, DeepBooru, Sampling methods, Euler A, Karras, CFG scales, denoising, and on and on as I go further down that hole.

“What’s that got to do with Children’s books?”

Just like a cascading thought process I started somewhere I swear. I wrote some stories. Now can publish them using Amazon KDP direct publishing.

“Self-publish print and digital books, and reach millions of readers around the world on Amazon.”

More importantly:

“KDP provides you with free and simple tools to self-publish your book in more than 10 countries in over 45 languages.”

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

As you can see from the blogs, I can write lots of words, sometimes in an organized flowing manner, but I’m not so great at illustrations. I wanted to immortalize my characters as real superheroes but had no idea how. I used Canva to provide a direct transfer template to KDP. Create the book, add illustrations, publish on KDP, advertise on Amazon, and when purchased it’s automatically published, printed, and drop shipped. An important note is that it includes a copywrite with an ISBN and a barcode. If anyone cares I can do a blog on that process if you want to make a coffee table book about your cat.

Side note, I print versions with the writing right side up and upside down for those such as myself who have issues reading upside down to children. (Always looking for the value add).

Wow that was easy. But I’m not an illustrator, I don’t want stock images, and it’s important to me that these books are personal to those who I wrote them about.

So onto AI for image generation. The first one you will usually find is Dall-E as part of the Chat GPT offering. Others if you search by phone will be Mayo Studio, PicSo, photo to cartoon etc. These only get you so far, or need credits, or are training only on public images most of which are celebrities. What does that mean for my heroes?  

It means that they produce crazy images:

Stable Diffusion offers text to image or even better image to image generative AI images. You can type requests using different hugging face models like moDi-v1-pruned.ckpt which will produce Disney looking characters from text prompts and negative prompts. But that’s not what I want. It doesn’t even look like superhero Matt standing next to an ambulance at 3 PM outside of a busy local hospital.  I give up for now...

This image:

Gave me this output:

Fast forward, my kids ask me about the pirate ship in our backyard since their playground has a ships wheel and pirate flags. The first think I can think of  is "How cool would it be to use google maps of my house and neighbors, convert it to a pirates map, bury some “treasures” and indicate them on the map with “X”?

I guess I'll need to go back to Stable Diffusion. I won’t even make a joke about “unstable diffusion” Google can help you out with that.

Ill give you time to digest before I go into what pirate maps have to do with children’s books since we already discovered what children’s books have to do with AI.

I also promise at some point when we find our way out of this hole, I will apply this to business process.