This IMO is a handwavy criticism of AI-generated content by people judging content who have the foreknowledge that the content was AI-generated.
To put it another way, pretend it was a year (or more) ago and ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion were ~unknown. You stumble across this kids book. Be completely honest here: would your reaction be "there's no way a human created this book"?
-> Hedgehog making bread -> Loves making bread -> One day bread stolen -> Butter everywhere -> Hedgehog sets out to find culprit -> Finds culprit -> Opens butter themed amusement park with culprit -> The End
There is no overlapping theme or logic to the story. Children's book will have some form of gimmick and stick to it (young humans aren't all that bright) so you can have a baker hedgehog that encounters adversity (bread is gone) and maybe tie it in with a human culprit (bread thief, didn't say please or something), but the butter amusement park is out of place and uncanny.
-> Caterpillar eats food -> Caterpillar eats more food -> Caterpillar eats even more food -> Caterpillar gets sick -> Caterpillar eats less food -> Butterfly.
The succession of events have a thread that join them together. I'm pretty sure ChatGPT could write it as well if you give it the above summary, but the hedgehog story doesn't have that and feel uncanny because of it.
Take a look at Penguin in Peril for example.
Cats are hungry -> they go to see a film -> they are still hungry so they decide to steal a penguin -> the penguin escapes -> the penguin swims through a fountain back to the zoo -> the cats get put in prison.
I dunno maybe it's still fairly coherent, but we've gone from "completely impossible" to "bad children's books" in like 2 years. How many more years do you think it will take to get to "good children's book"? I bet less than 10.
Where the Wild Things Are - a fever dream about rebellion and unrealized sexuality, hero's journey into the latent world and back.
Green Eggs and Ham - picky eating works on its own, or can stand in for just about any other unpleasant experience. The repetition mirrors the real-life experience of getting used to something you don't like.
Can't remember the name, about fuzzy little monkey people living in a hut? - really cozy, about the warmth and safety of being a cuddled-up tiny person without worry.
There's no throughline in this one. The prickly porcupine stands in for a stressed mom. The fairy stands in for a child who messes up the kitchen. The solution is play all day and leave the kitchen dirty? Doesn't hold together.
I'd take out the filler "journey" bit, add in some conflict between the mom and kid, and make the ending more realistic (fairy uses magic to make icing for the cake?). That might bring it up to library-filler tier book.
To me, the art looks really impressive though. Again, no throughline - I'd expect a progression that goes from lonely porcupine -> in the wilderness -> sharing the stage -> back at home but happy
THIS. This is exactly the power of these models. The AI generated an entire story in some extremely quick amount of time and an experience Human can edit and curate the results. It generates first drafts trivially.
> Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
It seems like the LLM did exactly what the author wanted
I read the prompt and I can see the human’s intention: write a story about how you turn something bad into something good. But the AI transitions didn’t land and instead of getting a heartwarming story of a clever hedgehog, it just feels like a badly executed Deus Ex Machina.
I think that's pretty different than GP's point about art needing to have "voice." It seems entirely clear to me that AI will get to the point where it can generate something coherent in terms of plot/theme/logic - that's just a matter of time.
The reason I might not have guessed it was a machine creation is that the prose is adequate on a technical level, and previous markers for machine creation included wonky prose. But going forward we'll all learn new markers for machine-created dreck.