When he’d completed his novel called The Girl from Wudang, PJ Caldas — pen name for PJ Pereira, Creative Chairman of Pereira O’Dell Advertising and Chief Creative Officer of Serviceplan America — wanted to find a creative way to mark its appearance. Since the subtitle of his book is A Novel About Artificial Intelligence, Martial Arts and Immortality, PJ thought it made sense to somehow use AI to promote the book, even if just as an experiment.

Using Stable Diffusion and some basic prompts, PJ put together an animated book trailer, the world’s first aided by generative AI. The prompt creation was done "by hand" — it required many hours and a lot of work provided by specialists that PJ was lucky to have access to. Most authors do not have that luxury.

But there is one thing every book author does have: the words in their book. So when PJ’s Girl from Wudang book trailer began to garner glowing responses, he got to wondering: Could an AI engine take the words from a book and turn them into one giant, rich, dramatic, detailed prompt? And then turn the prompt into an animation that enhanced and reimagined the reading experience?

PJ and a talented group of collaborators produced a prototype (the workflow still not yet fully automated) that was presented in Cannes, France, in June 2023, at an event organized by OpenAI. The feedback was wildly positive, and the animation — the first Hypnovel (then called a VBook, for Visual Book) —was used to promote the book’s successful publication in November 2023.

Excited by the possibilities, and the technical and creative challenges ahead, PJ and his partners — Andrew O’Dell, CEO of Pereira O’Dell and Serviceplan Americas, and Rob Wrubel, entrepreneur, Silicon Valley veteran, and founding CEO of AskJeeves and other companies — founded Silverside.ai, an innovation lab based in San Francisco, CA. They enlisted a group that included technologists (tech visionary Thomas Marban), writers (author Andrew Postman), visual designers (artist Nurlan Abdulleyav), go-getters, and other entrepreneurially minded folks, and launched a first project to develop what we now call the Dreamaker. It’s the engine behind Hypnovels that allows any author to turn the opening of their book into a sight-and-sound experience that’s truly new, different, surprising, hypnotic. And to reach — and excite — all kinds of people who might otherwise not know of their book.

As the first results came in, we weren’t sure if “successes” occurred only when a book had a particularly animatable story. But once we applied the process to dozens of books, we realized we were up to something truly special. The next great way to promote great books?

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