The Making of Roof Cat Floor Cat & Collaborating with Artificial Intelligence

Roof Cat Floor Cat is a tribute to our two cats who crossed the rainbow bridge in late 2022. We rescued them as stray cats, and they became treasured members of our family. Roof Cat Floor Cat celebrates the unique relationship that existed between the two cats, and the rhymes we would sing to them. On a larger scale, it also highlights the differences and similarities that we experience in our relationships with others, uplifting what makes us unique and what unites us. The language used is rhyming, rhythmical, and predictable, making it helpful for children who are learning early reading skills.

Roof Cat Floor Cat is special for another reason too, I have illustrated it in both freehand paint and paper, and digitally – that’s right, there are two versions! And it is likely my last book that will be fully illustrated on paper. There is a significant gap in time between finishing the illustrations and the final work, and during this time, I have been experimenting with digital illustration. Because Roof Cat Floor Cat was fresh on my mind, I decided that I would work through a few design ideas – and then suddenly I loved it.

Jennings (2019:3) writes that artificial intelligence is here to stay and encourages people to engage in critical thinking about their impact and uses in everyday life – and so I did. I began to look at how my work could be streamlined and some of the more mundane tasks such as settings and layouts could be made easier.

I have remained consciously unpublished, writing and illustrating for a small audience and maintaining ownership of my own works. This makes it even more important that I work effectively and continue to grow and learn new skills.

AI has the power to “improve performance and create value”. At this stage I am still very much learning about AI and what role it will play in my work, the platforms I have chosen to use have varying levels of AI and manual features.  A fully AI generated children’s book was produced and published in late 2022 by Ammaar Reshi using Midjourney and ChatGPT. It received much controversial feedback and significant backlash, yet it also proved the possibilities of efficiency and streamlining work. Mahmud (2024: 47.1) considers humans and artificial intelligence to be team players and believes that this is the key to a successful relationship between technology and the human race.

“Media have become as important in our daily lives as water is to fish” (Peters 2015 in Sadler 2021:2), and AI is an important tool. There is no longer one form of Artificial Intelligence, there are multiple branches, purposes, and types of AI in fast development and an international race is on to continue the new invention. “Rapidly developing digital technologies are profoundly transforming our world” (Nordstrom 2023:2203). With the impact of AI likely to increase and grow, there is only one option and that is to grow with it. What I have found is that AI can most certainly be used as a creative tool – there is no absence of creation, just the use of different tools and methods, and the ultimate design decisions still rest on me as the driver of meaning and communication.

I now turn my attention to the finished product and how I plan to reconnect with my readers as my work enters a new era. This is a big shift in the way that I work, and I am excited for where it might lead, but most of all I am excited about the shift in process. In producing Roof Cat Floor Cat, I came to realize that being fully digital allowed me to work in real time with the images and words together – I have always worked in a multimodal way with images and words, however, with hand-drawn images these processes happened separately, and they came together in a third step. Working digitally allows me to work on these together ultimately creating a product that is print-ready faster.

When I decided to use YouTube as the platform to share my journey with digital illustration and AI, I began to think about the broader placement of the platform community. The formation of the YouTube community and the way that the platform has helped to shape its community is considered to be cyclical as its users have also shaped it (Burgess & Green 2018:NP). And it was YouTube that I turned to when I needed help learning new skills.

The YouTube video above takes an intimate look at my decisions and processes while working on Roof Cat Floor Cat. It is candid and open; it is the real me. Kennedy (2021:563) discusses the ephemeral nature of identities on social media platforms such as YouTube and talks about how they are an ever-shifting form, often disappearing in time. Thinking about the ephemeral nature of social media platforms helped me to create meaningful content that is anchored to the here and now, not only for this video, but across my entire 3517online presence.

My work has always been honest and candid – and my presence both online and in person echoes this. This is important as my work is multi-generational. My audience is sometimes young children, and sometimes adults, making it even more important to manage my content and presentation carefully. Jarrett (2009:125) discusses the difference between the presentation of lay speakers versus experts. Those who are experienced appear objective, rational and abstract, whereas amateur broadcasters often appear authentic, open, credible, and aligned with their audience. My intentions are to be able to fit somewhere in between this, sharing my life, my knowledge, and my academic journey, but also maintaining the ability to connect in a humble and gentle way.

Printed copies of Roof Cat Floor Cat are available to pre-order here and will only be sold in the digitally illustrated format. We look forward to sharing this beautiful story with you and sharing updates on future projects.

Reference List

Brown, A. (2023). Making artificial intelligence work for you: Using AI wisely can benefit your platform. Publishers Weekly, 270(35), 125.

Burgess, J., & Green, J. (2018). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. Polity Press.

Jarrett, K. (2009). Private talk in the public sphere: Podcasting as broadcast talk. Communication, Politics & Culture, 42(2), 116–135. https://search-informit-org.ezproxy-b.deakin.edu.au/doi/10.3316/informit.942760481118381

Jennings, C. (2019). Artificial intelligence: Rise of the lightspeed learners. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Kennedy, U. (2021). Arriving on YouTube: Vlogs, automedia, and autoethnography. Life Writing, 18(4), 563-578. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2021.1927485

Mahmud, B., Guan Hong, & Fong, B. (2024). A study of human-AI symbiosis for creative work: Recent developments and future directions in deep learning. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications & Applications, 20(2), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3542698

Nordström, P., Lundman, R., & Hautala, J. (2023). Evolving coagency between artists and AI in the spatial cocreative process of artmaking. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(9), 2203–2218. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2023.2210647

Sadler, N. (2021). Fragmented narrative: Telling and interpreting stories in the Twitter age. Taylor & Francis Group. Available from ProQuest Ebook Central. [Accessed 14 January 2024].

****All images and videos were produced using Canva-Pro which I maintain a paid subscription to