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Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

There is a market, at least within south east asia, that mass produces stories like aesop's fables, and regional folklore. The books produced are thin 2minute reads and are available for purchase for less than 1 USD usually. It's not surprising to see grammatical and spelling errors slip into the prints of some of these books. The artwork is basic and while stylistically more consistent than OP's effort, it's entirely generic and forgettable (unlike the artworks of legends like Axel Scheffler or Sara Ogilvie).

I can foresee a very near future where this market is absolutely overrun with auto generated books + artwork. I don't think of this as a good or bad thing. It's just going to be interesting to see who gets the first jump on this.

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I fully expect that any kind of content store (Amazon books, podcasts, audio books, newspapers, news sites, social media) will be absolutely overrun with generated word soup trying to scam people out of a few bucks - e.g. just like YouTube is overrun with autogenerated creepy children videos.

Whether having to sift through massive amount of trash to get anything created with some quality is a good or a bad thing... decide for yourself.

I wouldn’t mind if a separated genre springs up, labeled AI generated or such. The problem I have is as you said, I don’t want cheap content masqerading as human made. Human content can be cheap too but automating that away would send a torrent of trash upon us to sift through

There'll be a lot of low effort stuff but there's also going to be a torrent of good work done with it. A lot of people seem to be missing the developments in these tools that allow you to take the initial result and then shape it through further prompts or by running it through other tools. If you're willing to put the work in to guide and polish the result you can produce some pretty good work with much less effort than it would normally take.

If you look around on Amazon a bit for books, you'll find a lot of low quality, high volume, and highly formulaic stuff aimed at different types of readers. Basically authors are churning out masses of stories with relatively simple, predictable plots with a lot of action/sex/intrigue/whatever geared to readers that gobble that stuff up as fast as it can be produced.

With AI you can improve the quality of the writing, tweak the style of delivery, add detail to story lines, and deliver stories faster.

Maybe an app for parents to make one with the content they want available as an ebook for x a month

I'm working on something like this

the Young Women's Illustrated Primer?

This is already happening https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-uses-ai-to-generate-animat...

Seen a few people trying to make these and honestly, it’s ok as a novelty thing. Like for a bday or unique occasion maybe. But using these as any kind of replacement for professionally done work feels like a disservice to children.

Good authors+illustrators for children are just so far ahead of any AI generated content right now it’s not even comparable. Something as seemingly simple as Julia Donaldson’s Smartest Giant in Town is a heart warming tale, told along a continuous theme with a consistent voice where the story wraps up beautifully at the end. Then it’s all brought together with delightful illustrations that match and delight so well. They aren’t just good illustrations. They are delightful. Heck. They even have Easter eggs of sorts. All of that gave my son and I so much to discuss, point at, draw, and sing together. Wouldn’t want any child who could have that experience to miss out on it.

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