A Comprehensive Guide to Generative AI for Beginners, Students, and Specialists
A book by the artist Sameh Al Tawil
"AI will not end art — it may be its new beginning. A beginning toward understanding how we create, how we see, and who we are." — Sameh Al Tawil
The Announcement
Cairo, 2026 — Diwan Publishers announces the release of The AI Guide — For Beginners and Specialists by the multidisciplinary visual artist, creative director, and entrepreneur in digital content and generative AI Sameh Al Tawil — the first comprehensive Arabic guide to bring together the technical, creative, and philosophical dimensions of generative AI in a single volume.
The book spans ten chapters and a standalone applied appendix, deliberately moving between three registers of discourse — the general reader seeking knowledge, the practicing creative professional, and the engaged, in-depth academic reader — without flattening any of them. From the self-moving machines of al-Jazari in the twelfth century, through Turing and the Dartmouth conference of the 1950s, to agentic AI in 2026, the book offers the Arabic reader a guide that is technically current, intellectually serious, and culturally rooted all at once.
Al Tawil writes as a practitioner, not a journalist. His art, built on new media and AI — including Chaos, the Homeland project, Short Shadows, and other works exhibited around the world — alongside his leadership of multiple teams and his founding of film-production and digital creative-content companies worldwide, grounds the book's arguments in lived artistic practice.
What Sets This Book Apart
1 · Written by a practitioner, not a journalist — The book draws on real experience and working contexts: actual pipelines used to produce real projects, such as the SciFi energy drink brand and ad campaign, the Lucky Day campaign for Mobil, and the generative-narrative model behind the artwork Short Shadows.
2 · Arabic in origin, not translated into Arabic — Written, designed, and built in Arabic, for an Arabic reader, grounding its examples in Arab cultural references (al-Jazari, al-Khwarizmi, Sayed Darwish, Cairo of al-Mu'izz). An English edition is forthcoming; the Arabic version is the original.
3 · Honest about what AI dismantles, not only what it builds — Algorithmic Orientalism; the "missing rung" in creative pipelines; cultural sovereignty in an era of homogenized models; human-in-the-loop vs human-on-the-loop governance for agentic systems.
4 · Three audiences in one volume — clear cultural metaphor for the general reader; practical prompts, workflow diagrams, and platform guides current through 2026 for the practicing creative; and, for the scholarly reader, Chapter 8 engages Haraway, Hayles, Barad, Deleuze, and Lacan at full strength.
5 · A book + companion site that stays current — a live site featuring a periodically updated tool directory, full tutorial articles, and the interactive "Agency of Tomorrow" calculator that lets professionals compare traditional production costs against AI-pipeline costs in real time.
6 · The digital appendix — essentially a second book — The Artist's Guide: a standalone prompt-engineering guide with workshops in visual art, filmmaking, music, and creative writing, with its own glossary and platform-specific working contexts.
7 · Currency of content — the 2026 generative-AI landscape: agentic systems, MCP protocols, multimodal models, the GPT-Image / Nano Banana / Flux / Veo / Seedance pipeline, node-based platforms like Weavy, and the consolidation of music generation around Suno and ElevenLabs Music.
The Companion Site
A live site at the book's address hosts:
- Tool Directory — a weekly-updated map of the most important AI tools, flagging each category's leaders and recency alerts
- Tutorial Library — full workshops, including the SciFi Energy Drink ad pipeline (GPT Image 2 → Weavy → Veo 3.1 + Seedance 2.0)
- "Agency of Tomorrow" Calculator — an interactive cost-comparison tool that lets readers model traditional vs. generative production budgets in real time
- Contact for press, education, and licensing inquiries
About the Author
Sameh Al Tawil is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, filmmaker, and Egyptian-German entrepreneur working at the intersection of human creativity, new media, and generative AI. Alongside his artistic practice, Al Tawil writes and lectures on digital art, AI, and digital content production around the world; he has worked as a creative consultant and founded several companies specializing in digital creative content. The AI Guide is his most comprehensive published work on AI to date.
Press Contact
- Author: info@samehaltawil.com
- Publisher: Diwan Publishers — Cairo, Egypt (diwanegypt.com) — wholesale orders, distribution, translation rights, and library requests
- Press materials available on request: high-resolution book cover and author photos