Now that most humans have such amazing new AI tools at our fingertips, we each have the opportunity to massively increase our productivity. My brother, wife, and I attempted to utilize this fact in 2024 by producing a Halloween book. It came out fantastic, and you can order it on Amazon today! It makes a great gift or just seasonal reading to get into the Halloween spirit while learning some historical and mythological origins of Halloween folklore.
We actually began working on the project in 2023, and it ended up taking much longer than expected because we put much more work into it than we ever intended to. I did a lot of fact-checking and research to strengthen the book’s AI-generated scholarship, my wife did magnificent graphic design and book design to combine the illustrations and text into an elegant volume, and so on. Lots of work was done that we weren’t quite able to delegate to AI just yet, but that now would easily be accomplished by ChatGPT’s latest models. It is shocking how far we’ve come in just a few years.
The idea of the book was to create an encyclopedia of Halloween creatures that goes a good bit deeper into the list of creepy aberrations than any similar book I had found on the market. The Halloween creature books I had seen before covered only the basics: witches, zombies, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, mummies, and a few other classics. Our book has those as well, and includes some lesser-known interesting facts about them from mythology and folklore. But our book also has other creatures, less common but still familiar to connoisseurs of fantastical entities, such as incubi, wights, banshees, wendigos, and many others.
One reviewer (yes, a friend of ours), wrote this on Amazon:
This text is the latest expression of both the form and function of Halloween; what better way to explore the mountain of folklore and legend than with one’s own ghost in the machine, ChatGPT? I found the judicious editing of the authors to have removed the potentially starched language employed by chat models, for which I am grateful. The aesthetics of the book are lovely, with various stylistic influences blending into a haunting piece for every entry.
I encourage all fans of the spooky and spectacular, the phantom and the forlorn, to purchase this book of Halloween. It is all treat; their trick was expended in making such a text a reality.