Reshi said that he has received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm. “If we can’t have discourse without being civil, then we’re not going to make progress,” he said. He added that the strength of the reaction had made him think more about the issues at hand. “It’ll make me do more homework, for sure,” he said. “I want to do the right thing. I want to help support the artists if I can.” This isn't the first time that AI-generated work has caused controversy. An AI image won a contest earlier this year, much to the ire of some artists (via CNN). Criticism usually centers around two arguments: that the creator did not create anything themselves since the AI did the work, and that AI art is a form of theft because it is trained on the original artwork of other creators. Good or bad as this book may be, it poses some interesting ethical questions which I really don’t know the answers to. I haven’t really seen a good answer from anyone how we are supposed to deal with these new kind of “artists”, but I suppose they are here to stay.

Ammaar Reshi, 28, has been fascinated by technology since he was a child. “I was always curious, and my dad let me play with his computer when I 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 led Reshi to Palo Alto, California, and since 2020 he’s worked at fintech company Brex, where he’s now a design manager.

The debate has heated up even further with the announcement of Alice and Sparkle, created by design manager Ammaar Reshi. He completed the entire children’s book within a weekend using ChatGPT, MidJourney, and other AI tools. When a raft of generative AI tools started to hit the market over the last few months, Reshi began tinkering with them. Earlier this month, he had the idea to make a book for his best friends’ kid, who was born this year, using AI. “I said I was going to take a weekend to try to put this out there,” he recalled. First, Reshi used ChatGPT to come up with a tale about Alice, a young girl who wants to learn about the world of tech, and Sparkle, a cutesy robot who helps her. “That gave me a base of a story,” Reshi said. “It was OK. It had its issues, of course. So then I started tweaking it.”

Reshi is aware of the controversy that his book caused and discussed the risks of AI-generated content: One critic is Anupa Roper, a children’s book author based in the UK, who said she had a “sinking feeling in the pit of [her] stomach,” when she saw Reshi’s tweet. “I’m thinking, Is it really that easy to create something that I had to pour my heart and soul into?" Roper said. Alice and Sparkle is a children's picture book about a young girl named Alice who creates an artificially intelligent robot named Sparkle. The two go on an adventure where they learn about both the potential benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence. Since December 4th, it has sold about 70 copies. Reshi will donate the rest of the copies to his local library. Then there is actually the other problem which is that both AIs are using the works of human artists to create “their” works. So shouldn’t those human artists be credited for this work at the very least? One could possibly think of this in terms of the way artists are under influences from other artists, but of course AI is in a very different situation to human artists, as humans have to eat and sleep and basically live, while AI can scan artworks constantly 24/7.There are serious, incredibly valid concerns from artists and writers about all this technology. Their emotional responses are fair, we should listen and instead should ask: To the creators of these tools at OpenAI & MidJourney: how do we ensure protections for artists / train models on consent? Their talent, skill, hard work to get there needs to be respected." With AI and machine learning tools used in its writing and illustration, Alice and Sparkle is said to be the first book of its kind to do so. Not only that, but the entire story’s plot also centres around the young protagonist creating her own AI companion.