Parenting Times: How to use text to image AI to encourage your child to write

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

How to use text to image AI to encourage your child to write

Today we will explore text to image AI, namely the one offered by Bing and powered by Dall-E by Open AI, ie the same developers as Chat GPT.

It is text to image AI, so where does writing come into it, you might ask.

Well, as parents, we should embrace technology and think of ways to use technology to teach our kids. Technology has many pros and cons. We can be blissfully unaware if our kids use it to generate art and pass it off as their own by copying it or we can use it in creative ways to teach our children. Here is one way you can use it positively.

Text to image AI requires you to describe the pictures in your mind and the AI will generate it. The better the description, the better the output.

With this in mind, here's how we can encourage our kids to write by using the text to image AI.

1. Describe the real thing. Real people, real places etc that children remember. Encourage your kids to describe the pictures in their mind. Remember, the better the description, the better the output. Ask them to describe things around the house, describe each individual around the house including you, their parent (eg a lady cooking in the kitchen, with yellow tiles and brown kitchen cabinets and a pot of flower on the centre table) if this is how they imagine you to be. You can ask them to use adjectives, colours and put everything in their mind into words. This is suitable for younger kids to help them express the things they see into words and then see the picture in their minds being rendered into art.

2. Describe something in their imagination. Now this is really fun and creative. For kids who love to write stories and novels, here is something slightly more advanced you can do. Unlike the above where the kid is supposed to describe into words something real that they observe around the house or when they are out, ask your kid to describe something in their imagination. Ask the AI to render the art from their imagination and then ask them to use the pictures as prompts to write a short story or a novel if they so fancy. This is great for aspiring young writers, preteens or teens.

Important Tip: Use words like digital art, 3-D rendition, origami art, watercolor painting, cinematic landscape, Japanese anime, pop art, retro, geometric, ukiyo-e style, black and white pencil drawing, cartoon, futuristic, abstract macro photography, vintage, Chinese brush painting and many other words to render different genres of art.

Here are a few examples.

"space scene with man in spacesuit, rockets and planets futuristic cinematic"

"girl in a magical library with flying books japanese anime"

"door leading to secret garden"

"enchanted fairy tale house cinematic landscape night time winter"

"boy with a dog in a summer field vintage style drawing"

Now time to try it out here: https://www.bing.com/create

This is something you can do with bored kids at home during the school holidays.

You may also like: Using Chat GPT for school, what parents should know

Here are more fun stuff for kids to do at home during the school holidays:

Arts and Crafts.