How can we let the user steer the story but still be surprised?
There's no true "random" in the way an LLM (Large Language Model) works and if we ask it for ‘a random story’ by typing into ChatGPT ‘make me a random story’ then there is no feeling of creative direction by the person. Plus we want it to be structured to suit a comic book. While you might imagine that an AI can just throw together a random plot or character, it's not quite that simple. LLMs are trained on massive datasets of text and code and they use statistical analysis to generate content, meaning that even seemingly "random" events are deeply rooted in the data they were trained on and the instructions we give them.
The screenshot below is the result of many iterations and enhancements. What started as a box to type in your story idea became a whole framework of pages, panels, characters, location, theme, problem, solution and audience inputs. All of those details are bundled into a prompt for the AI to create the comic story with dialogue for each panel.
