Show HN: LLM Choose Your Own Adventure

Hi, I'm Brad, software engineer, long time HN lurker. I have been working on this project for a while and I think it is ready for more feedback. I have been calling it Snow Day Adventures, an app for k-12 students home from a school snow day that beats watching YouTube or Instagram.

One of the things I consistently used chatGPT for is creating bedtime stories for my two daughters. They were never very long, but we could customize them and ask for edits. It was a fun activity we could do laying down before bed.

Fast forward to just about a year ago when an administrator at my daughter's school reached out about AI. We had a meeting where we talked about the basics but I really had no idea how AI would work in K-12 education. There were a couple apps that they use, which were fine, but I felt like they did not take advantage of the technology. At the same time, I was not qualified to give them advice.

So I started building little apps here and there. I would test them with my daughters. Usually they would get bored or it would feel to much like homework. Sometime this summer I focused on generating engaging stories and came up with a workflow for generating choose your own adventure stories. After a couple iterations, I got to where the app is now: turn any story into a choose your own adventure.

I have loaded a couple public domain stories to start with. The idea is pretty simple: pick a story, you will see the first page and at the bottom you will see a link to the original story the author wrote and three generated pages. Once you pick a generated page, you will only see generated options (and you will probably see the options take ~10 seconds to load). You can also click the refresh button which will replace that page with a new generated one.

The generated pages are never as good as the originals, but it does make it more fun. Going back and trying different paths creates endless amounts of content. I think the bigger opportunity is to customize the stories to the students reading level and language abilities. I did a couple tests with bi-lingual story generation, and generating from a strict lexile reading level; both showed some promise.

I know it does not technically need a user to log in, but I am a little worried about story generation getting out of hand from bots. If anyone has any ideas for preventing a search engine bot from clicking every link on a page that generates new content, I would be happy to find an alternative. Maybe you have to log in to generate new content but the already generated content is public? Let me know what you think.

Thanks for taking a look.