Show HN: I “wrote” a kid's book with ChatGPT and Midjourney
A fun experiment but LLM generated stories will never escape the uncanny valley, because they&#x27;re not novel, they&#x27;re remixes. I know the critique of that position is &quot;but humans just remix the things they know from the world&quot; but that is the same misunderstanding that those who thought truck driving jobs would be automated by 2018 made about that profession. i.e. The less you know about a field, the more likely you are to believe it will be easy to automate.<p>Art, in this case illustration and narrative, requires a coherent viewpoint. In literature this is often referred to as the authorial voice. Voice is special because of the uniqueness of the human life behind it, which I realize sounds a bit airy-fairy, but is very true once you start digging into what works and what doesn&#x27;t. When you read something and wonder why it&#x27;s so engaging when it&#x27;s not _that_ much different than other very similar pieces, that&#x27;s often what&#x27;s at work.<p>It&#x27;s also why some pieces really don&#x27;t work for some people. The &quot;a kid could draw that&quot; critiques of various modernism styles come from this place.<p>I don&#x27;t begrudge people experimenting with art through LLM generation, and perhaps it can be a great tool for scaffolding ideas, I grant that. However, I do worry about the deluge of poorly conceived LLM content that will make the good stuff harder to find. We had a glorious age where the gatekeepers had lost most of their power. With the flood of content about to be released, I&#x27;m afraid we&#x27;ll find ourselves beholden to them once again.