Tool Tuesday: The story of creating an AI-generated story!
Continuing on an artificial intelligence (AI) track this month, I was curious recently whether any tools have surfaced that specifically relate to creating stories. Creating a story about a timely, curriculum-related, or personally relevant topic is, of course, an activity that can create a great context for analyzing the result with Story Grammar Marker® and applying its icons to language mapping. AI tools are also fun to play around WITH students and can be used metalinguistically with prompts to the tool to use specific story elements.
It turns out that there are a number of AI story generation tools, and you can use ChatGPT for text creation, but for this post I explored Perchance. This website offers a general story creation tool but others, including a character builder and bedtime story creator which reads to you and adds music! All of these are notably free, and also generate images of characters or story actions.
From my experience with AI, I am learning that this can be somewhat of a trial and error, and/or dialogic process with the tools, so today I want to present some steps I took to achieve a desired, usable result.
I started with a simple prompt about Thanksgiving, with an eye towards encouraging my students to take a role in helping at home. Here I included some story structure which the AI did not quite implement accurately.
Hmm, a reasonable start, but here we see a Kick-Off/Plan and not the Actions or Conclusion. It’s also rather “Hallmark Channel” and makes me want to brush my teeth due to its over-sweetness. But, I can easily do some quick edits to the result. I would recommend cutting/pasting/editing text and images from an AI into a simple format like a Word document or Google Docs/Slides.
I went on to ask the AI to “add 3 actions Timmy does to help” and it came up with some great ones, such as cleaning his room and making turkey-themed place cards.
The text being workable, I tried out the image generator available on the page. Not realizing it couldn’t reference its own creation, I asked the AI to “show Timmy making place cards with construction paper and crayons.” The hilarious result is below:
Wait, how did Timmy become an adult? Also, scary art. Let’s try again: “show a little boy making turkey-themed place cards with construction paper and crayons.” The AI:
All right, a baby making 3D carrot placecards. Not quite right. The lesson being that specificity is important, I went with “show a 7-year-old making turkey-themed place cards with construction paper and crayons” and got much better results.
You can also click “regen” and it will come up with something slightly different that you may like better. As mentioned, just cut and paste your text to another format, and secondary/right click to copy or save any images.
Overall, with short work, I had a usable story that was certainly easier than writing one myself! Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and find year-round uses for this handy tool.
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