Bøger af Nicholas Ponticello

What happens when you let artificial intelligence illustrate your story? Pan is a pig with many identities: singer, pirate, explorer. Pan can be whatever he wants to be with the right book. This exciting story for early readers was illustrated entirely by an artificial intelligence program called DALL-E. Check out the colorful renderings that accompany a text full of warmth and encouragement. Join Pan on his many adventures and discover just how liberating reading can be! DALL-E is a program from OpenAI that uses artificial intelligence to generate images and illustrations from short text prompts provided by the user. For this project, the author fed phrases like "oil painting of adorable pig singing on stage with trees and stars" into the DALL-E interface to generate images that fit the story he wanted to tell. Hundreds of renderings were generated for this project, and the author chose the 28 best images to illustrate this story about a pig named Pan who loves to read.

The darkest secrets never stay buried forever. Charles Abernathy Vanderough has been dead for nineteen years. But when his clone shows up on the doorstep of the old Vanderough estate, a family is forced to confront their troubled past and face their darkest secrets. Cuckoo Cuckoo is the story of Charlie B, a penniless clone and conman, who goes in search of the family fortune, only to find deception and tragedy at every turn. Set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential primary, the proliferation of gun violence in America, and the apotheosis of selfie culture, Cuckoo Cuckoo reminds us that nobody can outrun their demons in an increasingly technological world.

It is two hundred million years into the future, and Earth is devastated by a dying sun whose expanding photosphere has melted the surface of the planet and driven humans underground. In this world, humankind is doomed to extinction. But Marcus Fincus thinks he can secure the survival of the human species. He selects a small crew of brave voyagers from the insignificant but determined planet Earth to set out in search of a new home. Their ship, the Destiny Unknown, is designed to take care of everything. Every meal is regulated to the ounce. Every mile is charted and mapped. Everybody has his or her own unique role in this microsociety: doctor, teacher, electrician, engineer. Then the inevitable happens: the passengers start to behave as people. The captain seduces half the women on the ship, his wife develops a neurological disorder, their sixteen-year-old son runs away in the escape pod, and the doctor dies in a freak scalpel accident. The Maiden Voyage of the Destiny Unknown is a dark parable about the nature of human existence. Told from the perspective of an alien observer who follows our heroes like an unsympathetic reporter from National Geographic-he refuses to intervene when our heroes come face-to-face with deadly meteor showers, alien cannibals, and other crises that threaten to destroy them all. Funny and philosophical in its treatment of human nature, The Maiden Voyage of the Destiny Unknown not only seeks to understand the place of humans in the universe-it also seeks to address the looming question: What makes us so special?