Ammaar Reshi, 28, has been fascinated by technology since he was a child. “I was always curious and my dad let me play on his computer when he was 5 years old,” he said. He grew up in Pakistan before his family moved to the UK, where Reshi studied computer science in London. A job at Palantir Technologies brought Reshi to Palo Alto, California, and since 2020 he has worked at fintech company Brex, where he is now a design manager.
When a host of generative AI tools started coming out in the last few months, Reshi started playing around with them. Earlier this month, he had the idea to make a book for the son of his best friends, who was born this year, using AI. “I said I was going to take a weekend to try to post this,” he recalled.
First, Reshi used ChatGPT to create a story about Alice, a young girl who wants to learn about the world of technology, and Sparkle, a cute robot who helps her. “That gave me the basis for a story,” Reshi said. “It was good. It had its problems, of course. So I started to modify it.”
He asked ChatGPT to make Alice a little more curious and Sparkle more self-aware. Reshi then used the Midjourney AI app to create the images he wanted. “I started putting tags like ‘girl’ and some descriptors: ‘blue eyes’, ‘simple dress’, ‘excited’, ‘curious’,” she said. “That yielded some results. Now let me tell you, some of those results were absolutely insane. It would have become a horror book if I put those first illustrations”.
He spent hours fine-tuning the directions given to Midjourney, estimating that he turned down “hundreds” of illustrations to get the 13 that fill the 14-page book. “I almost gave up because I was like, I don’t know if it’s possiblebut then I advanced to the end,” he said.
