Google’s Gemini LLM has a new Gem, called Storybook. Before diving into that, Gems are custom versions of Gemini, designed to be particularly suited to one, small, given task or area. There’s a career guide, a coding partner, a learning coach, and two experimental models; one for chess, and the other for stories.
Jumping into Storybook, you enter a prompt for a story – the simpler the better, and let it do its thing…
You’ll get a ten page, illustrated e-book, with audio narration if you want it.
First thing I’ll say, human authors are safe. Very safe. This is cute, but it’s really about the novelty value rather than any literary (or even basic storytelling) merit.
I created a book for a work friend for a giggle, here’s the prompt:
My co-worker is a talented and skilled copywriter, creating articles and product pages for our company’s website. Please write a funny story of a day where silly things go wrong in her life and job, but she still comes out on top.
And here’s the story. Elara’s Sparkling Day. I don’t think Gemini’s quite got the hang of funny, or continuity.
This pic is supposedly of her spilling coffee on her white shirt. Interesting way to wear a shirt…
As something to make my brilliantly accomplished copywriter colleague laugh – purely for the ridiculous factor – it’s great. As a story you’d go out of your way to read. Not so much.
To push things a little further, I pasted in this micro-story from my creative writing blog, and asked it to turn the snippet into a storybook. It didn’t. At all. Which, on reflection, is sensible on Google’s part. This was my work, so my choice, my copyright, but there’s no way to guarantee that, and you can bet Google is not keen on plagiarism or copyright lawsuits.
Here’s the storybook it did turn out. You’ll see it used the start of my snippet to get the character names, but that’s it…
The original is about an artist – a painter – and her insistent sister. The storybook version? Two uni friends opening a bookshop.
With The Whispering Stone (it seems to have a thing for Whispering), I wanted to see if it could come up with something a little deeper. The initial prompt was: write a story about a woman researching an ancient myth and how she finds different versions, then writes her own that connects it to the current world and people.
I then asked it to turn the story into more of a fantasy adventure. It’s interesting looking through the pictures and seeing where the AI image prompts have clearly been set up to show something consistently, regardless of logic – as with the locket Elara (it likes repeating character names too) is always wearing, even when she’s being given it, and when she has her back to us.
So, speaking as a writer of stories as well as blog posts, I think I’m safe (for now). These narratives are awkward, and have a habit of smashing ‘deeper messages’ home with all the subtlety of an airborne brick. Have fun with it – make a birthday story for someone, or one to commemorate a work project that felt like a dungeon quest – then ask Gemini to recommend some real books you might enjoy.
AI for Squishy Humans 
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