When my wife and I first moved in together, we rented a tired apartment in the center of town. It had a nice big living area, a little patio we would barbecue on during COVID lockdowns and a mattress that looked like somebody had died on it. One day a stray cat emerged from the little bush in front of the apartment and never left! He is the inspiration for the illustrated storybook I made my wife for her birthday, using illustrations created with ChatGPT.
About The Cat - Inspiration
We were coming home on a breezy Cayman evening, having watched silly old Christmas movies with friends. As we walked towards our apartment, a mangy cat came out of the bush and hissed at us - more likely me specifically. In the movie we’d just watched, a haggard old witch who lived in the forest kept popping up unexpectedly. The prince referred to her as “a crone.”1
“Looks like that crone from the movie we just watched,” I exclaimed. My wife laughed, and we soon started calling the cat Crone. We didn’t know at the time that he was a boy—but the name stuck.
Every day, my wife would sit outside and chat with Crone, feeding him cat treats—and dipping into my hurricane tuna supply. Eventually he allowed her to pet him. Crone went from hissing at us each day to coming running for his treats and a chat.
A kind neighbor took Crone to the vet one day after seeing he wasn’t looking very well. The vet diagnosed him with a sun allergy and feline AIDS. Given he was a stray living in a bush, we volunteered to adopt him so he could live indoors. Conveniently ignoring the fact that I am allergic to cats and that our landlord didn’t allow pets. My wife argued Crone was family and not a pet, deciding sneakily keeping him in our apartment until our new home was finished was worth the risk. This was completely reasonable and got us a significant amount of Good Place points.23
Sadly, in the time we were waiting for our new home to be completed, Crone passed away. His memory, his legend, has lived on far longer than we knew him. In his memory I began to tell crazy elaborate stories to my wife. Stories of the cat that came from the bush in front of our house and his many adventures. My wife loves the stories, often asking me to come up with new adventures, usually at highly inappropriate times.
Why Use ChatGPT to illustrate a storybook?
I’m what one might politely call particular. So whilst I’ve had the idea to turn my Crone stories into a book for my wife for a long time, I didn’t have a way to do it. I looked into getting an artist to illustrate it, but the costs were prohibitive, and I’d likely not be satisfied with the result. I’ve worked with artists before who I sadly drove absolutely dilly with notes. Even in my searches I struggled to find an artist whose style I loved. When AI Illustrators started becoming a thing, I got excited. This artist would never tire of my notes, was reasonably priced, and let me tweak things endlessly to match my vision.
What worked, and what didn’t
I didn’t expect the process to take so long. ChatGPT was exceptional at creating the first draft of an image I wanted it to dream up. Often very close to what I wanted, especially when I was super detailed in my ‘prompt’. I tackled my special project by writing a story and breaking it up into pages that would require images. I then tried to be as detailed as possible, describing the image I wanted to create. Providing example images of the characters based on photographs of us and Crone. That often produced fantastic results within a few tries.
However, there would always be small tweaks I’d like to make, tweaks that would have been quick for human artists but ended up taking hours of back and forth with ChatGPT. The bot would often hallucinate, adding random elements - some seemingly pulled from memories of past projects I’d used ChatGPT for. For example in the past I’ve used it to make a cartoon image of my family for this column and included our dog. Sometimes a dog would randomly appear in the image I was creating, despite never having asked for it or mentioning anything but a cat in my prompts.
Consistency in characters was also very difficult to pull off. Although I think I got better at giving the bot enough information to keep the images moderately consistent, it would often take hours to get a small change to look good. In some cases I gave up and resorted to fixing smaller details in Photoshop myself. Something as simple as fixing a character’s eye colour or asking for an untucked T-shirt—seriously, when have I ever tucked in a T-shirt?— would often result in my character looking completely different.
After months of jumping in and out of the project, I finally started to make decent progress, just in time for my wife’s birthday. I then put it together and sent it off to a printer in Canada. Creating this for her felt infinitely more special than anything I could’ve bought off a shelf. It’s incredible that we have access to such powerful technology today. I was able to write, illustrate and print a completely unique story from my MacBook. Who knows, maybe the adventures of Crone could become a series for the family to enjoy.
A Crone is an ugly old woman as defined by Oxford Languages
My wife added this line.
The Good Place is a comedy series created by Michael Schur (Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine). It follows Eleanor Shellstrop, who wakes up in a utopian afterlife called “The Good Place,” only to realize she doesn’t belong there. The show blends sharp humor with philosophical and ethical questions, exploring what it means to be a good person—with plenty of twists along the way. It aired on NBC from 2016 to 2020.
Brilliant! I'm sure Crone's debut has been worth the wait! I can see a series in the making: The Adventures of Crone-- the Craziest Cat in Cayman!
Awesome experience Marc, you should share the book sometime.