Imagine your life with kids, coming home exhausted after a long work day and your child is waiting for you to play together full of energy. You have to cook dinner, shower, tidy up the living room, read them a story before going to bed and so on. Can ChatGPT help you with that? As we all know ChatGPT comes up immediately with creative essay ideas and easily solves every problem straight away, I asked it to “generate an original story in maximum 400 words” and this is what I got:
Is the generated story really an original piece or is it an amalgamation of other stories?
So, it turned out that ChatGPT based its story on the collection of these three fairy tales for kids. But is this necessarily bad? ChatGPT still made its own version mixing these three stories, so this means that it can create many different versions of bedtime stories as long as it mixes different existing stories. As children are excited to hear new stories, ChatGPT can grab their attention every time. Moreover, most old but also new stories are recycled ideas from other sources such as having similar folklore stories in cultures that are close to each other (McManus, 2023). So, the chances for somebody not to have thought of a concept and made it into a story are slim. Overall, the story is easy to follow with not as many characters and containing the mystery and magic characteristics of fairy tales makes it engaging for kids. What might be considered as a problem is that ChatGPT is trying to deceive us by pretending that it didn’t use any external sources to create the story but then when asking the question differently it is prone to admit that it is a mix of stories. This is important to address because this is proof that we should be careful how we use ChatGPT and to what extent we believe it at first glance. Therefore, we should always ask it the same question but phrased differently in order to see how ChatGPT can change its answer.
In conclusion, ChatGPT seems to be able to generate new stories every day before bedtime which would make my child excited to go to bed but also can develop their imagination. Then, here comes the question would the authors of child stories be endangered by ChatGPT such as we can also generate visuals of ChatGPT’s story by other AI Generative tools? Would we then ever need to buy books with bedtime stories?
References:
McManus, M. R. (2023). How folklore works. HowStuffWorks. https://people.howstuffworks.com/folklore3.htm
That is an absolutely delightful application of ChatGPT I’ve heard of in a while! I feel like the use of AI tools in daily tasks like this is still not explored that well. As you mentioned children want to hear new stories all the time, so generating fairy tales through ChatGPT can be a great way to provide them. And I think there are also possibilities for generating personalized stories that would make children connect even better with fictional characters. That could help to process recent events through the form of a bedtime story or help to overcome struggles and fears that children might be facing at the moment by incorporating them into stories.
However, as you well mentioned, there are still unresolved privacy-related concerns with such applications of generative AI. I think such systems need to be more transparent about what sources they use to create their replies. In that case, the authors would at least get certain recognition for their original ideas and stories. Moreover, the concern of AI tools replacing books is also a valid point I believe. Especially, in the children’s book market where the need for new stories is high, people might prefer using the AI tools regularly, instead of spending money on real books. However, I feel like this is also one of the changes that the industry needs to adapt to and come up with new solutions that will create even better value than generative AI.
First of all, I really like the idea of ChatGPT coming up with bedtime stories. I still cherish the memories of one of my parents reading those to me. In addition, the story that ChatGPT came up with is heartwarming and perfects as a good night story for a child.
I even think this could have positive implications for families that do not have enough money to buy the traditional bedtime stories. This would be a great way for parents to still give their children a memory to cherish and not spend any money.
I also think that when something new is created, it is unavoidable to get inspiration out of something that has already been created.
Lastly, I think it could very well be that authors of child stories are endangered. However, since stories are so easily generated, writers really have to stand out and be creative and this would have a positive impact on the overall level of childrens stories.