By now we’ve all heard of how ChatGPT & Midjourney generated a Children’s Book.
I wanted to replicate this process on my own to see what could be done in a single afternoon on a Sunday night. The result was pretty entertaining, and honestly provides a great way for Authors and Artists to get inspiration or help build out ideas for a world of their own.
I first asked ChatGPT to write me an eight-chapter outline for a Lovecraftian-style story with the following synopsis:
Meredith, a daring female explorer, discovers an isolated inn in the snowy White Planes of New Hampshire. In dire need of funds, she takes a job offered by the innkeeper to guard a mysterious room that can only be opened from the inside. As she stays at the inn, she becomes romantically drawn to a cheerful woman named Evelyn. However, strange noises emanating from the room and the presence of a supposed “angel” within, lead to a shocking revelation that it is a deadly demon, which kills everyone at the inn except for Meredith.
After my outline was created for me, I then asked ChatGPT to write me a short summary of each of the chapter outlines. From there I then asked for a chapter for each outlined topic with their summary one after the other.
This took a little amount of time back and forth as I’d feed the same prompt but change the chapter title and summary provided, wait for the chapter to come out, and repeat. Eventually, I ended up with my eight-chapter short AI-generated novella of ten pages.
The next was to get Midjourney set up and working. This took me a bit. I don’t often use Discord, so setting up my room and adding the Midjourney bot, ensuring proper permissions were set, etc took some level of effort, but no issues arose that a quick Google search couldn’t solve for me.
Once Midjourney was set up I then became very distracted by created images of my black cat battling demons, however, once I was able to focus again, I began feeding in the description of Meredith, Evelyn, and The Whispering Inn and received the following four options. I liked all variations so much that I kept them for this example rather than taking the time to upscale any of the versions that came out.
Once completed, I put everything together into a Google Doc and shared it with my friends. While this was a silly thing, it was quite fun to do on a weekend. I could easily see ChatGPT prompting competitions becoming a thing between my friends and I. This is by no means a great story for the ages, but this was all created within a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. Had I wanted to write, and maybe I will someday, a Lovecraftain-style story about Meredith and her adventures I could use this as a great outline and base to expand upon.
Related Post: ChatGPT Source Code Documentation