A Preliminary Exploration of the Cooperation Between Humans and AI in the Creation of Picture Books

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has shown great potential to assist in the creation of picture books. The fairy tale of The Little Match Girl was adapted in this study to explore the application of GAI in “story creation” and “illustration creation” by combining human creativity and AI generation technology to produce a six-page picture book. Furthermore, the performance of AI and a human in the process of the adaption was compared and analyzed. During story creating stage, the researcher of this study employed ChatGPT to generate story structure and creative elements. ChatGPT had a great accomplishment of condensing and narrating stories, but its adjustment on emotional tones required human interventions to achieve the desired effect. Although there were several modifications prior to the ultimate ending to “war” and “tragedy” requested by the researcher, ChatGPT did still show excellent creative potential. When creating illustrations, the researcher used ChatGPT to generate commands and Midjourney to generate illustrations. With character setting and costume details requiring human tweaking and integration, Midjourney excelled at color grading and atmosphere simulation, but having consistency between details and style was a challenging task for Midjourney. In the process of selecting and modifying generated content, AI tools played an important role in inciting creative ideas. The results of this study indicated that GAI was feasible to improve creation efficiency and inspire creativity; however, human intervention was still needed in details and accuracy. As an auxiliary tool, AI could effectively support artistic creation, but achieving the desired results required fine adjustment by humans. It is hoped that this study can serve as a reference direction for future artistic creation.