In this era of scarily fast technological advancements, our world is facing two truths:
1. This generation of kids is exposed to the internet and social media and its potential dangers more than any other generation before.
2. Generative artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent in the digital world than ever imagined.
Pondering these two points, our team at That Random Agency had a lightbulb moment. We’ve always been at the forefront of leveraging innovative tools to create meaningful content; why not throw our hat into this new ring of AI?
We wanted to create something that could teach kids about internet safety, all while only using AI. The question was: Could AI write and illustrate a children‘s book good enough to publish?
Thus, Internet Safety Sammy was born.
The use of ChatGPT has been a rising trend in the digital marketing world, so we choose this as our tool to dive headfirst into and test its limits.
To first determine how well ChatGPT could capture the essence of a children’s story, we simply asked it: Act as a children’s book writer.
It churned out a magical tale for kids, but from there we wanted it to weave a narrative that taught lessons on online safety and privacy in a sneakily fun way.
Next, to establish its knowledge on tips for internet safety for kids, we requested: In the words of a preschool teacher, tell me the top 10 warnings of social media that a child would need to know as they grow up with access to the internet.
This resulted in the following answer:
Next, we asked ChatGPT to craft a children’s story using these 10 lessons. It gave us a story that was overtly about internet safety, and we wanted a more subtle approach that would still be palatable for kids.
We requested the story to be re-written in the setting of outer space, and we fine-tuned from there. We asked for more detail, a reading level for ages 6 to 10, and more inclusion for diverse families.
After a few manual tweaks from us humans, we had a complete story.
Mission accomplished. Now we just needed the illustrations.
AI was not only our writer, but our illustrator as well. Here, we tested out Canva’s new Text-to-Image tool.
We used the text-to-image tool to describe the graphics we needed. Planets and galaxies would be easy, we thought. But describing the characters and their purposes and contexts in the story? That would be a bit more difficult.
We prompted the tool to create an image around each subject in the story, utilizing the color pencil art style.
One example of a prompt we used was, Design a portrait of a futuristic child talking to a mother about what they are seeing on a device.
It took a few rounds of regenerating the images to get the right fit, but we landed on images to include in each of the chapters.
The images were surprisingly relevant, whimsical, and looked more like an illustrator hand drew them rather than a computer.
Now that we had finally completed this ambitious project, we couldn’t just let it live digitally forever.
We knew we wanted physical copies, so we self-published!
The book is now available for purchase on Amazon here.
This book wasn’t just a fun experiment in content creation; it also marks a paradigm shift in digital marketing, where AI becomes more than just a tool. AI is a helpful storyteller and co-creator.
Here’s why we care so much about this project:
Random is all about zooming into new frontiers, and this AI-crafted children’s book is just our latest rocket ship into the future of digital marketing.
We’re your co-pilots in all things social media, SEO, podcasting and beyond! Contact us today to learn more about how we can work together.
