The AI sisterhood

Tech lends a helping hand in shaping a little girl's journey as a big sister

My younger daughter decided to announce her second pregnancy to our family and friends in her own creative style. She sent a photo of her older daughter Kinu wearing a t-shirt that said, ‘I am going to be a BIG SISTER soon’. My elder daughter, who is the big sister of Kinu’s mom, got so inspired by the wording that she decided to teach Kinu in a fun way what it takes to be an elder sister. 

Out came her laptop, and fingers started dancing on the keyboard. She summoned Open AI’s Chat GPT, the world’s most popular conversational artificial intelligence application for textual content creation. With a few guiding prompts, a story was born in a matter of minutes about Kinu’s quest in a magical land with mystical creatures and talking animals imparting wisdom on being a responsible big sister. Armed with the story, next she roped in Open AI’s Dall-E, a conversational AI application for visual content creation, to build comic-style images to accompany the story. Now for the final effort-intensive step, which would be to stitch the textual and visual narratives together to create a digital comic book, Canva, an online graphic design platform, came to her aid.

In just an hour, she had a comic book of 15 pages titled Kinu’s Big Sister Quest as a high-resolution pdf file. The result was stupendous, with beautifully illustrated graphics peppered with flora, fauna, and frills. The central theme of the story is about 3-year-old Kinu’s quest for knowledge about being a big sister. She is very fond of the outdoors and gardens, collects pebbles and leaves, and chirps along with the birds. Thus, Kinu carries her favourite maple leaf as a lucky charm and goes around asking an owl, her favourite dog, a unicorn, her nanny, her dance teacher, and the flower lady about what it takes to be a big sister. From them, she learns that she should and would be the light and joy of her little sister, bringing warmth, love, sharing, and caring. My favourite part is when the flower lady tells Kinu that she will be to her little sister what the sun is to the sunflowers. At the end of the day, Kinu goes to sleep, dreaming about all her encounters of the day.

Kinu’s mom printed out the pdf file because she did not want little Kinu to stare at the screen to look at the comics. The little girl is thrilled to bits to see herself in the pages of a comic book and has gone through the whole book numerous times sitting on her mother’s lap. So much so that she can accurately repeat the content of each page, although she has yet to learn to read sentences.

My hope and prayers are that Kinu uses the machine-curated wisdom she has imbibed and blends in her own human values like empathy as she ventures on her new journey as the older sister.