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My 4-year-old son absolutely adores stories. This is marvellous and we have strived to first motivate this interest and then continually encourage it, picturing those ideal parents who cuddle up to tell their children stories. What those ideal parents never convey, however, is the absolute mental exhaustion of the tenth consecutive story about a T. Rex, a jet ski and a carrot.
Enter ChatGPT, which at time of writing was still relatively new and had just released the functionality to create your own GPTs. I created the Children's Story Creator GPT to address my son's insatiable desire for stories. The Children's Story Creator can be found in OpenAI's GPT store, available at time of writing, May 2024.
But just any old story wouldn't be good enough. ChatGPT works shockingly well, particularly when given more constraints within which to operate. Stories work best when delivering a moral message of some kind. So I made the Children's Story Creator build each story around a moral. I also wanted to be able to incorporate whatever new vocabulary my son was currently learning, so that too became part of the set up.
Finally, kids just love pictures with their stories. Here, however, ChatGPT still (in 2024) falls very flat. It can create stunning pictures, but is completely incapable of maintaining consistent characters from one image to the next. But kids also love colouring, and ChatGPT can create pretty good line drawings for colouring, so that's what I opted for.
The results are awesome. Within this book are 20 stories generated by the Children's Story Creator, split into sections for four-, five- and six-year-olds, along with one picture for colouring for each story. Although the stories are supposed to become more complex with the target age, this difference is only minor, so all ages could read all ages, but I've aimed for a variety of themes, without repetition.
Nevertheless, as you read through the stories, you will notice patterns: they always begin with a similar paragraph introducing the characters via the town they live in, at some point the child's eyes sparkle with excitement, and so on. Generating truly varied and novel stories on different themes and with different styles is quite beyond the scope of this GPT, and probably beyond the abilities of ChatGPT as it stands. That is for a later project.
