Death threats after AI-generated book sale spark backlash against enthusiast

Ammaar Reshi, a fintech employee at Brex, created the AI-generated book Alice and Sparkle for a friend’s child. Its sale sparked a flurry of criticism and death threats on social media, reports BuzzFeed News.

The enthusiast used the chatbot ChatGPT to write the story about a girl named Alice who wants to learn about technology and her robot assistant Sparkle. He asked the system to make the heroine very curious, and the assistant — self-aware.

Then Reshi used the text-to-image AI generator Midjourney to create illustrations for the 14-page book.

“I started with prompts like ‘young girl’, ‘blue eyes’, ‘a simple dress’, ‘excited’, ‘curious’,” he said.

According to the enthusiast, this yielded certain results.

“Some of the pictures turned out absolutely ‘ridiculous’. If I had used those early samples, it would have made a horror book,” he added.

There were also some hilarious results 😂 what’s going on with those eyes and hands?! pic.twitter.com/N5kzUrDIsZ

— Ammaar Reshi (@ammaar) December 9, 2022

Reshi said he spent hours crafting prompts for Midjourney and discarded hundreds of illustrations to obtain 13 final images.

After 72 hours of work, the author uploaded the result to the book platform Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

At first, the enthusiast planned to make the book only for his friend’s child; however, after a news post on Instagram, he received many requests to buy it. According to the author, he has sold 70 copies and donated about 45.

When Reshi shared the news on Twitter, he faced criticism from followers and book illustrators.

The author Anupa Roper said that she “felt something tightening in her chest.”

“I thought, is it really so easy to create something for which I had to put my heart and soul?,” she said.

According to author Josie Dom, Reshi does not deserve to be paid for the book, as “he didn’t put in much effort.”

She also pointed to numerous defects in the images and called the story “template.”

Illustrator Cory Brickley posted a tweet showing the anomalies in the AI images.

just wanna save this for posterity in case i get blocked pic.twitter.com/oa4rLXPBGq

— Cory Brickley Illustration (@CoreyBrickley) December 12, 2022

Reshi replied that he did not expect the negative reaction.

“I was upset by the artists’ concerns. I understand that they see in this an existential threat to their existence,” Reshi said.

Additionally, according to the enthusiast, he received death threats and messages encouraging self-harm.

“I am saddened by how these debates ended. Hateful rhetoric and insults are not at all amusing to read,” Reshi said.

The author expressed doubts about a second part of Alice and Sparkle, “until he learns more about AI art.”

In December, OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot, which can answer questions, admit mistakes, argue and reject inappropriate requests.

In November, the Midjourney algorithm received a major update and learned to blend images.

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