AI is changing the world at frightening speed. A bestselling author decides to find out more… ‘Something profound and utterly brilliant is going on… hilarious.’ THE TIMES Is ChatGPT the end of creative industries as we know them? An ethical quagmire from which there is no return? A threat to all our jobs, as we keep hearing on the news? Bestselling children’s author Andy Stanton has made a career out of writing differently – from the unconventional ‘hero’ of his bestselling Mr Gum series to his penchant for absurdist plots, his children’s books are anything but formulaic. When a friend introduces him to ChatGPT, the new large language chatbot, Andy is as sceptical as he is curious. Can this jumble of algorithms really mimic the spontaneity of human thought? Could it one day replace human authors like him for good? And are we soon to be ruled over by despotic robot overlords? He decides there’s only one thing for it – he must test this bot’s capabilities. Eventually, he settles on a prompt that will push the algorithm to its creative limits: ‘tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis.’ Chaos ensues. What follows is a surprising and illuminating battle between Andy and ChatGPT that maybe, just maybe, might help us all understand AI a little bit better. Join Andy and his beleaguered AI lackey on a rollicking metafictional journey through the art of storytelling. Presenting his prompts and the AI-generated narrative alongside extensive commentary, Stanton provides a startling paean to the art of a good story and boundless human creativity. Hopeful and hilarious, Benny the Blue Whale provides a joyfully anarchic meditation on AI, literature and why we write. *** A WATERSTONES AND NEW SCIENTIST BEST BOOK OF 2023 ‘There’s no book like it. Scholarly, childish, fascinating and hilarious – one of our funniest writers dissects what it takes to build a story and what that tells us about being human. It’ll really make you think, if you can stop laughing.’ Chris Addison, co-creator of BREEDERS ‘Entertaining and alarmingly relevant, provocative and philosophically satisfying, it’s ultimately a profoundly human text.’ OBSERVER ‘A magnificent experiment by a perfect fool – deep and shallow and stupid and clever – the perfect use of AI (Andy Intelligence).’ Robin Ince, author of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING INTERESTED ‘Benny the Blue Whale is many things. It’s a fascinating discourse on the nature of language and storytelling. It’s a philosophical treatise on the possibilities of artificial intelligence. It’s a receptacle for obscenely hilarious jokes... A brilliant and beautiful cyborg: part human brain, part computational muscle. It’s a post-post-modern work of genius.’ Anthony McGowan, Carnegie Medal-winning author of LARK

Mr Gum is back in this second hilarious book and he's as nasty as ever In fact, he's absolutely grimsters. But this book's not just about him. Meet a gingerbread man named Alan Taylor who has electric muscles Plus, all our favorite characters are also back: the little girl called Polly, the evil butcher called Billy William The Third, and the very wise man, Friday O'Leary. And, who could forget loveable Jake the dog, or the angry fairy who lives in Mr Gum's bathtub and whacks him on the head with a frying-pan?

Benny is a nut. A real baseball nut. He walks around announcing baseball games ... It's Benny, Benny, Baseball Nut!

After tragedy disrupts her life, Willa escapes her grief by venturing into fantasy. But she soon wakes Baku, a creature whose sole purpose is to devour the threads that tie dreams to reality. With the beast in pursuit and her new friends, Benny and Hadley, helping her, Willa is thrust into adventure. To overcome Baku, she has to find the only person who ever faced the monster and survived, a reclusive old woman who lives high in the mountains. This coming-of-age story contains moments of comedy, but it ultimately deals with overcoming fear and loss. Willa is about a young girl returning to the United States after having lived her whole life on military bases overseas. It is a discovery of a home she has never seen, and the realization that she can build the world she wants to live in.

From the most celebrated children’s nature writer of our time comes a posthumous new novel in the tradition of her Newbery award-winning Julie of the Wolves In 1848, a young boy witnesses a rare sight—the birth of a bowhead, or ice whale, he calls Siku. Years later, he unwittingly brings about the death of an entire pod of whales, and only Siku survives. For this act, the boy receives a curse of banishment. Through the generations, this curse is handed down: Siku returns year after year, in reality and dreams, to haunt the boy’s descendants. Told in alternating voices, both human and whale, Jean Craighead George’s last novel shows the interconnectedness of humankind and the animals they depend on. “It’s a bold, wistful, and heartfelt coda to a distinguished career.”—School Library Journal

Something is very wrong at Monterrosa Elementary -- again. Weird noises and funky smells are coming through the classroom vents. Could the school be haunted? When one of their classmates falls into a coma, best friends Carlos and Benny know it's time to call in the best monster hunters they know: each other. This may well be their wackiest extermination challenge yet! In his third Monstertown Mystery, Bruce Hale delivers another silly, strange, and spooky tale for readers who like their chills with a side of chuckles.