Sample Project 1

Here’s an example of how I hope you’ll submit your book project.


“An Abecedarium of Dwellings” is a computer-generated alphabet book, in which each page features an illustration of a type of building — from Apartment to Ziggurat — accompanied by a rhyming iamb. The text and images were produced with ChatGPT and Midjourney, with minimal editing.

I was inspired by abecedariums from the 1700s (such as https://archive.org/details/gallopingguideto00banbiala/). I reckoned that the alphabet would provide a good framework for making a collection of related media, and I knew I was on track when ChatGPT was able to generate rhyming abecedariums on different themes. To unify the illustrations, I gave Midjourney prompts of the form “A 17th-century engraving of __”, swapping in the first line of the ChatGPT text. Unfortunately, not all of the locations are dwellings (e.g. ‘O is for opera house’) but that’s an understandable challenge for anyone. ChatGPT also wrote the summary text on the back cover.

The process was straightforward, but did need some manual intervention. Because of ChatGPT’s 4000-character limit, it only made the poems in sections (A through F, etc.), so I had to fix that. In a couple of cases, I asked it to revise a stanza, because it used a word repetitively (rhyming a word with itself). I think the final result is ‘satisfactory’, but I confess I find the text bland, and I wish the images were weirder. I feel that AI accelerated the process of making this project ‘okayish’—but making it ‘good’ would take a lot more (curatorial) work.