Pietro Schirano adds, "To me, it seemed like magic." "I was slightly frightened since it was so wonderful." He is discussing the most recent iteration of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) technology. You type anything, and the system generates a response for you. The responses are eerily human, amiable, and intelligent.

The end result is impressive to anyone unfamiliar with AI but often far from perfect: Images tend to appear with strange anomalies -- in Reshi's case, crooked eyes and 12 fingers -- and text created by ChatGPT can have quirks and errors that remind us that AI is not quite human. Reshi spent hours refining prompts and editing text generated for the book, and he rejects the criticism that all he had to do was "hit a button."

Ammaar Reshi was playing around with ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI when he started thinking about the ways artificial intelligence could be used to make a simple children's book to give to his friends. Just a couple of days later, he published a 12-page picture book, printed it, and started selling it on Amazon without ever picking up a pen and paper. The feat, which Reshi publicized in a viral Twitter thread, is a testament to the incredible advances in AI-powered tools like ChatGPT--which took the internet by storm two weeks ago with its uncanny ability to mimic human thought and writing. But the book, Alice and Sparkle, also renewed a fierce debate about the ethics of AI-generated art. Many argued that the technology preys on artists and other creatives--using their hard work as source material, while raising the specter of replacing them.

What the hell are we doing? All the best things are shutting down and people are out here using computers to make children's books? Not to get too Jeff Goldblum on you, but just because you build a tool to do something doesn't make it interesting or worthy. To wit, a product designer named Ammaar Reshi (previously employed by Peter Thiel at Palantir) has used AI to create a children's book in praise of AI… and it is fatuous and ugly. Unsurprisingly, those of us who actually like the human touch in art aren't thrilled.