The AI age has taken more than a few surprising turns over the past couple of years. Some of them relate to a core strength of LLM technologies: the power to visualize.
For people who don’t need to aggregate a lot of information daily, image-making may have been their first intro to AI with early tools like Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, or later ones like Sora, Nano Banana, and GPT’s own image creation paradigm.
Along with computer vision, which helps AI entities to understand what’s around them in the real world, the ability to produce visual content helps AI to tell stories to humans in new ways. As soon as we figured out how to create vibrant, compelling pictures with AI, people got serious about spinning up materials that attract audiences in a visual way.
Now, we have Notebook’s ability to bring together key details from source documents, combined with the modern power of next-gen image creation, and one application of that is actually creating book-length comics or graphic novel projects.
Some Examples
A Medium article by Vlahovic Ines goes into some of how this works, for the would-be creator. You have to get past some pretty garbled English here. The first sentence, “For many students and people in general, science look sometimes as a science fiction,” is a tough one, and the phrase “maybe we can simplified it” in the second sentence is enough to break a serious reader out of the box, perhaps the product of a language barrier? But the idea stands tall: with today’s technology, we can actually make our own visual comics and graphic novels, on any topic that we like.
So what’s in these graphic novels made up by NotebookLM in conjunction with visual genAI? Well, you could create comics to make people aware of climate change, or challenges like that, which impact the world pretty significantly. Or you could tell the sci-fi story itself, how we got here, and where we may go from this auspicious crossroads. Or, you could tell a traditional character story, one that illustrates how modern life works now.
Over at Control Alt Achieve, authors list four big benefits of visual novels for audiences: inference skills, “dual coding” with image and text, accessibility, and introductory power. Eric Curts, on this page, provides us with dozens of examples of such visual projects, like a National Parks tour, reports on famous persons from history, and recollections of historic events.
Others are also enthusiastic; at Geeky Gadgets, Julian Horsey writes January 21 about using Gemini with Notebook, to this end.
“What if you could create stunning, professional-quality comics without needing years of artistic experience or a massive budget?” Horsey writes. “Imagine generating captivating narratives, designing unique characters, and refining your ideas into polished, shareable formats, all with just a few clicks. This isn’t just a shortcut; it’s a fantastic option for storytellers, educators, and creatives alike. Whether you’re crafting an epic adventure or an engaging visual guide, these platforms strip away the complexity, leaving you free to focus on what matters most: your creativity.”
Back at Medium, Ines also hypes the use of Notebook for this purpose. Instead of trying to read the article, you can take a look at the visual, which gives you a good idea of how this works:
The AI as Artist
For so long, writers have hired professional artists to illustrate their works. Now we can just outsource all of that to an LLM. The AI can write the thing, too. But you might get a more cohesive result having a human write the book, and letting GPT or some other model make the pictures.
It’s worth pointing out that NotebookLM is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) technology, which means it has the ability to take the input data and translate it to results, in ways that other models may not match.
Why Graphic Novels?
In detailing why graphic novels have taken off, United Through Reading assures us that these more visual cousins to the traditional text novel still count as reading, with the following:
“Graphic novels are underappreciated in literary circles, often dismissed as ‘comic books’ for kids or light reading unworthy of literary consideration. However, this perception rapidly changes as educators, scholars, and readers recognize their unique and profound benefits. Far from being mere picture books, graphic novels offer a rich reading experience that engages a wide range of readers. Graphic novels significantly enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary. The combination of visual and textual storytelling helps readers decode complex narratives. Further, readers learn to infer meaning from the text and the images. ”
Graphic novels can, these authors tell us, bring students closer to appreciation of reading, if they don’t like traditional approaches.
“Research has shown that graphic novels can improve students’ reading skills,” the authors write. “For instance, a study published in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature found that students who read graphic novels scored higher on comprehension tests than those who read traditional texts.”
So think about how making these products with LLMs can have a positive impact on learners. And stay tuned as I chronicle the highlights of the MIT convention earlier this month.