Pamela Fox

CORE 112

Spring 2005

Creative Project

The Automated Children’s Book Generator

Since it may not be obvious to the casual observer, I’ll begin by

explaining my project. It is an automated children’s book generator

that uses a database of images and descriptions combined with

several preset templates to randomly generate a new “story” each

time the user wants one. The templates used in this basic version are

just a “Learn your A,B,C’s” story and a “My Favorite…” story. These are

both based on real children’s books that I found in the library and

wanted to attempt to duplicate. The images were found by searching

images.google.com for “animals”, “food”, “places”, etc. Luckily

children’s books have a narrow vocabulary and are thus easy to build

databases for. The image descriptions were found by using

googlism.com, a service that will tell you what it thinks the entered

item is, in wh-terms, by searching the web. For example, a search for

“What is USC” will yield results like “USC is at the forefront of research

and treatment in cancer” and “USC is always a nasty game.” I used

these Google services to suggest that an online version of this program

could dynamically update itself using results from the web, and would

be even more random than my own program. Potentially, the human

only has to write the initial program that knows that a children’s book

is a sequence of pages describing one sentence events, supply the

program with a knowledge of English language semantics and let the

program grow on its own from there, using the web to continually fill its

databases and expand its knowledge. The number of children’s books

that could be generated with such a program are, in fact, infinite, due

to the infinite nature of the English language.

The main question I wanted to address in the creation of this

work is whether technology and its resources will stifle creativity or

encourage it. In class at the beginning of the semester, I brought up

the controversial Flash movie that stipulated a world where Google

replaced human journalists as the premier news provider by simply

accumulating bits and pieces of information from the web and writing

its own stories (and even customizing them to user’s biases!). This is a

scary thought for journalists and writers in general, as it threatens both

their job and the value of their job. If a program is able to automatically

generate the same article they belabor over, do they actually have any

valuable skills? Of course, if I could code a program that wrote news

articles, I’d be dirty rich and not writing this (I’d just make my program

write it!). But because that is still a difficult task for even the best

programmers, I decided to see how much I could automate the

creation of children’s books, arguably the simplest form of writing

that’s published, and see if I could threaten anyone’s jobs/ego with the

program.

I discovered that my “Learn your Animal A,B,C’s” story could

indeed compete with all the online versions I found of such a story1.

But this type of story is more of an illustrated list than a plot-driven

story, so it’s obviously quite easy for even a 5-year-old to create. So I

compared “My Favorite…” story to online examples. I found that it

could compete with the least exciting of these examples2. If the

program were given an English semantics database, I do think it would

produce better stories. However, the stories generated would always

lack what the best children’s stories have: a punch line, a twist, a play

on words, or a moral lesson. Programs don’t understand non-literal

phrases, and they don’t understand moral lessons (especially how to

write a story that conveys one). Programs can generate combinational

output, but they can’t understand how to combine output to create a

funny story or teach a lesson. The basic conclusion is that the

automation of non-creative menial children’s books is indeed

automatable, but the creation of truly good and unique books is a task

better reserved for humans.

1
Check out http://www.magickeys.com/books/alphabet/index.html

2
http://www.magickeys.com/books/sniffy/index.html
 So if automated children’s book generators were to become

popular in the future, they would probably kick out the authors of the

examples I used in this text from the market or force those authors to

become more creative. So it seems that just as automated machines in

the industrial revolution forced craftsmen to become more unique to

sell their own work (to prove it couldn’t be done by the machines),

automated book generators would encourage creativity, forcing human

authors to really use their creativity in writing books. The importance

of creativity in the modern age is fast becoming a trend, for similar

reasons. It is no longer enough, if you want to be successful, to be

really good at mindless (relative to machine minds) tasks. You have to

bring something new and innovative to whatever you do to avoid being

replaced by a machine. This trend is exemplified in comparing the

Silicon Valley burst when thousands of average programmers who had

been doing successful (being average) lost their jobs with the new

technology revolution led by inventors, not coders.

Instead of being fearful of the machines replacing us, we should

welcome the challenge in the machine’s technological abilities: we

have to, and we can, maximize our creativity. In doing so, we may even

find out that creativity is the most innately human characteristic.