Affordable senior housing residents are writing and publishing original children’s stories with a little help from information technology and artificial intelligence.
Witlingo, a McLean, VA, company, worked with five senior housing communities — Woodmere Senior Citizens Housing, Crescent Park Senior Citizens Housing and Harborview Apartments, a Volunteers of America community, all in New Jersey, and Weinberg Villages and The Weinberg Place, both part of the Comprehensive Housing Assistance network in Maryland — to help them engage with their residents.
The Witlingo Stories team worked with groups of two or three residents in 20-minute brainstorming sessions for a fictional children’s short story. Vitiligo Founder and CEO Ahmed Bouzid told McKnight’s Senior Living that the sessions kick off with a Witlingo team member sharing a sentence, then passing it on to the residents to build off of, creating a story sentence by sentence.
“We wanted the seniors to be completely imaginative and playful and otherworldly,” Bouzid said about the choice to have residents create children’s stories. “When we started initially with real life stories, they constrained themselves to the world around them and their setting.”
The brainstorming sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed by the Witlingo platform, then processed by Witlingo’s Generative AI children’s short story creation system, a customized OpenAI-powered language learning model engine specifically tweaked and trained for children’s stories. The system took the transcribed raw text and created narrative short stories/
Vitiligo Founder and CEO Ahmed Bouzid told McKnight’s Senior Living that his goal was to create 20 short stories and publish an illustrated children’s book on Amazon, as well as an audiobook on audible. Those books are scheduled to launch this week.
Residents volunteered for the project and were given a $10 gift card as a token of appreciation. Any money earned from the project will be split equally among the residents, who also will retain full copyrights to their respective stories.
Bouzid said that the company is working on a nonfiction book with the Jersey City Housing Authority for the Berry Gardens public housing communities. It will focus on life events of residents. He anticipates publishing that book by mid-November.
