What AI Thinks My Book Characters Look Like
And: Which Shanghailanders Character Are You? - the quiz!
I’m tickled to share the new Which Shanghailanders Character Are You quiz. It’s now available on Buzzfeed.
When reader turned email pal turned social media accomplice Pratyusha suggested the making of this quiz, I could not have been more pleased. We worked on the questions together, coming up with topics such as favorite vacation spot, favorite book, argument style, luxury brand, etc.
At the end of the quiz, though, when the result was announced, what image would appear for the winning character? We decided to play around on Midjourney to see what AI thought the Yang family looked like.
I started off by asking a text-only AI platform to generate some text descriptions of the characters from the book. Pretty funny to see the platform confusing the Yang sisters with my own children. Apparently the youngest fictional child of the Shanghailanders family is a boy named Max…
The descriptions were an interesting start. We edited those to our liking (and to the correct genders), and plugged those into Midjourney, the AI image generator. Honestly, because this was a first go at AI for both of us, we didn’t do any editing to the images; we just selected the one out of four options that we liked best, with one or two rounds of auto-iteration on that final selection.
For example, with Yukiko Yang, aka “Baby Kiko,” we generated images based off the description: “Young Japanese girl, 15 years old, cute and attractive, fun makeup, red lipstick, white summer dress.” If you read the book, you know the significance of the lipstick and the white dress!
In the photo below, the bottom row is the first set of 4 distinct images generated based off the description. We then asked for variations on three of those, which appear above row by row.
The final selection:
I that Kiko would love the dramatic lighting here, the way half of her is illuminated to the point of transformation. Kiko also sees herself as more cute than pretty, and I liked how this image captured a kind of intentional posing and seductiveness.
So, without further delay, I present the AI Shanghailanders cast of characters:
Go take the quiz to find out which Yang family character you are!
And if you have no idea what any of this means, or how these portraits match up to the fictional characters, go to Bookshop or Amazon or Spotify or your local brick and mortar or wherever you prefer to buy the book/e-book/audiobook. ;)