AI and I: The Birth of a Fantasy Adventure Romance
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| Front cover |
With the whole world still in the grip of AI mania, I have produced an AI-assisted fantasy adventure romance about the birth of the Merlion, Singapore's most loved icon.
It tells of a chance encounter between a lion and a mermaid on a beach in Singapore in a time of myths and legends. It was love at first sight. But their love was forbidden, and the lion had to embark on a perilous quest to win the heart of the mermaid. Love triumphed and soon a legend was born. The Merlion.
My journey began with outlining the story and feeding it into ChatGPT and prompting it to expand the story. It worked at light speed, spewing out the result in under two minutes. After some variations and editing, the script was ready.
Earlier I had generated the images for the story using Leonardo AI. I used both the platform models and the community ones. As expected, the products were delivered in seconds and I was bowled over by the quality of the images especially those that were prompted for hi-res photorealistic style. However, as to coming close to meeting my needs, the results were spotty. I had to generate hundreds of images to arrive at a workable set. But I had other tools in mind to edit and enhance the pictures to my requirements.
One of the workarounds I gleaned from the posts of other users on YouTube was to generate the background separately from the subjects, then composite them into one coherent whole. My thanks to all of them.
Using Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint, I remixed the renderings to their finished stage.
Finally when all the parts were ready I assembled them into a book using InDesign and exported the file as an ePUB for submission to Amazon.com. Preview the book here.
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| Back Cover shows the lion presenting the Merlion to the community. The pose is my tribute to the The Lion King. |
AI has proven to be an amazing tool that can complement the ideation process, and has taken me in directions that I could not have imagined on my own. While AI works in seconds, coaxing it to do your bidding can take hours, and editing/rewriting text, and re-compositing/editing/enhancing the pictures in image-editing software can take days. It depends on how exacting you are, and your skill level in the new art of prompts, which has acquired the mystique of sorcery. However, when you reach a dead end you can always change the story to fit the illustrations and vice versa.
Yes, there's a new career on the horizon, the emerging prompt engineer as someone called it. These newly minted personnel would have the power when deployed at scale, to turn mere words into solid gold.
Book description for Merlion a Legend is Born:
One day a mermaid caught the attention of a lion on the beach. It was love at first sight. But their love was forbidden, and the lion had to embark on a quest to win the heart of the mermaid. Love triumphed and soon a legend was born. The Merlion.
The Merlion’s link to Singapore can be traced to the mythical sighting of a lion by Sang Nila Utama, a prince of Palembang who had landed on the island when it was known as Temasek or sea town. He then renamed it Singapura, or Lion City using singa for lion in Sanskrit and pura for city.
In addition, a merlion-like sea creature called a sea-lion in western heraldry, was on the insignia of the East India Company, the enterprise that Sir Stamford Raffles represented when he founded Singapore in 1819.
Today Singapore is still the Lion City, but the Merlion reigns supreme as the most loved mascot of the Singapore tourist industry, and is the inspiration for the myriad souvenirs that are out to win the heart of the visitor. And that includes this book.
A fun read for teens and grownups with a soft spot for fantasy adventure romance.
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