AI children's books, body horror edition
lcamtuf.substack.com
lcamtuf.substack.com
It's like surreal absurdist art.
I'll start: John Rocco, How We Got to the Moon. (http://www.howwegottothemoon.com/)
( with bonus book ban credentials:
From the time of its publication in 1947 until 1972, the book was "banned" by the New York Public Library due to the then-head children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore's hatred of the book.
According to children's literature expert Betsy Bird, Moore criticized Goodnight Moon due to the fact that she believed it lacked a meaningful narrative structure and educational value.
)"Good night little house and good night mouse, good night comb and good night brush, good night nobody, good night mush"
My kids loved the mush part. I still remember it more than a decade after I last read the book for the bajillionth time, often more than once per night, to a kid that wouldn't go to sleep.
So mainstream, it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work
Dad: How's your math coming?
Calvin: I don't do math anymore. I decided I'm more of a "visual" person.
Dad: Good. Visualize being the only 45-year old in first grade."I won't give up my rubber band" is a sweet, imaginative, thoughtful exploration of the thing we get attached to in our lives. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58739625-i-won-t-give-up...
"I wonder where I am" is a exploration of maps in various forms, a bit over my 2.5 year old's cognitive abilities, but I think it's great. Can't wait until he's able to get it.: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204810909-i-wonder-where...
The books from Julia Donaldsson are classics. I am partial to Gozzle:
Gozzle https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gozzle-Julia-Donaldson/dp/152907641...
The snail and the whale: https://www.amazon.com/Snail-Whale-Julia-Donaldson/dp/150983...
My kid had a loooong "The hospital dog" phase: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hospital-Dog-Julia-Donaldson/dp/150...
I skipped some of the native romanian books we read since there are no known translations that I am aware of. One of the main reasons I want to teach my toddler english is so that we can appreciate a wider selection of books, because there are many books not translated in Romanian.
I also noticed that the quality of the translation matter immensely, probably more than for normal books. And a lot of books just don't translate all that well because they rely on rimes or alliterations.
And they don't believe things even can be better because they regularly hear one of the dumbest ideas of our time: that the past wasn't actually better, we only remember it that way.
Surely that's been a thing for decades. In the 70s, there were bars that harked back to the 1920s. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug
After 40, people become gullible again. FB is full of people who think an actual Ghibli clip is AI generated.
No offense, but it's these people who can't tell the difference who are most afraid of it.
The kids, lied to all their lives develop a kind of immunity to it. I can easily tell a poorly photoshopped picture, because my brain can recognize inconsistent shading and the repeated background effect when something is erased.
Kids these days will spot AI in 10 seconds. Right now, it's the composition. Even if perfect, AI will enhance it in a certain way and focus from some angles, and there's particular art styles. There's some collector card variants that people hate because it feels AI, even though it's not AI, likely done from tracing/redrawing something AI generated.
nah they stay fuckin dumb their whole lives. the rube demographic stays rube.
the difference is arguably engagement -- working people are around a lot more folks, going places a lot more, and are exposed to a lot more; by 50+ they're not, and their habits are a lot more set in stone.
retirees aren't getting out to clubs and meeting clients, they're at home listening to things entirely in their curated comfort zone
I've found that by putting meaningful effort into AI storytelling, I can create bespoke stories that my kids love night after night.
My workflow is below: Caveat that it costs about $0.25-$0.50 to weave a book like this with Claude Sonnet and Gemini Nano Banana Pro. But to me the cost is worth it for the quality.
- Use Claude structured output and ask for page1, page2 ... pageN instead of an array of pages or wall of text.
- Pass a story arc as a set of values to the prompt. I.e. say each page has an emotional beat between 0.0 and 1.0. For a "man in hole" type of story: page1 starts at 0.6, page2 = 0.5, page5 = 0.25, page10 = 0.85. This ensures page 5 lands the "crisis" and page10 resolves higher than the start.
- For illustrations, have Claude generate the story text and an illustration prompt per page. i.e. page1: { "text": "...", "illustration": "..." }.
- For art consistency, add an "Art Direction" key to the structured output. Feed this into Gemini/OpenAI and ask for an art board visual guide & character reference sheet.
- Feed the page text, illustration prompt, and the art board to Gemini/ChatGPT images. I'm constantly surprised at the quality of the output.
Here's an example set of pages from a magic school bus style story about the immune system
[image] https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/839188039229112353/...
Of course your current method requires quite a few steps, but it's not hard to imagine a tablet where you just prompt "hey Claude, please take care of my child" and Claude automatically generates things that are engaging for the child while teaching it things. Things you'd never ever be able to do yourself. Your role is to just feed the child. You don't even need to be present - Claude automatically reacts in case of an emergency. Claude even taught the child how to maintain cleanliness so you don't need to do that, how convenient.
I think that creating books customised for their kid(s) interests and then editing the book and reading it to them sounds awfully like great parenting.
Way better than reading sacharrine Disney books with their unsubtlety degraded morals.
For me it's still about human connection though. I read the stories we create together. It's just a great tool. It makes any topic relatable. I.e. even crazy fun ones like "Claude weave a bedtime story about how the 5nm chip fab process works including EUV lithography and clean rooms".
Quick short 5-10 minute read and next thing you know we're talking about lasers and how sand becomes computers.
"of course now you're behaving like a fantastic parent, taking time, money and effort to create custom stories, ensuring they'll never forget it"
And then follow with:
"it's not hard to imagine that at some point you'll just get bored and throw them a tabled and Ai chatbot".
Not just disturbing but dare I say, malicious.
I thought my obsession with children's science books [1][2] from the 50's and 60's (the ones I checked out from the library when I was young) was just a nostalgia thing. But when I see the dumbed down crap that passes for "science books" these days (Grossology? c'mon, man…) I realize it's more than that.
FWIW:
I've had a project on and off the back-burner for years now that is a kind of children's science (and other things) book that is meant to engage children's sense of wonder about the world (I mean, it is wonderful). The project is meant to to be an inexpensive, physical book, and meant to be given to students for free.
In my fantasy, a series of these books would be produced that each focus on a different developmental age. Each year the students get the next book in the series to take home and own. (Also, the whole thing is especially useful to poor kids.)
In time, each kid will grow a small library of their own at home…
[1] Example of a good one: Kenneth Swezey's science books like this: https://archive.org/details/chemistrymagic00swez
[2] Another good example, UNESCO's: https://archive.org/details/700scienceexperi0000unes_q9o7
That window is now closed. If I wanted to be an author I’d probably try to get a real publisher, with all the downsides that entails.
It’s today’s hot successor to the big drop shipping craze, which is also still happening, and has destroyed Etsy. That was another hustle culture thing. I remember hearing something about it being one of the get rich scams Andrew Tate was teaching at his thing.
You could use AI to help make a good book like this, but you would proofread and fact check it and sit there and converse with the AI and tell it all the stuff to fix… just like vibe coding.
It's like there are some things that do not even need AI and thats okay. Children's books also don't need a hurculean effort to write/create (the part ai tries to automate and fs up). In fact, its almost entirely about the concept and direct execution.
You mention vibe coding but this is fundamentally different and it doesnt apply
The way AI got used and integrated makes it hard to produce quality and easy to produce a lot of slop. That was deliberate design and marketing choice.
> is anyone out there using AI to make more higher quality children's books than were possible before?
Of course not. Quality children's books were always easy to find. There was no "impossible to create quality children's book" problem before. There was "it costs money to produce sloppy childrens book" problem for companies that tried to live from producing slop kids books.
Over time, i hope the chickens come to roost.
The difference is that multimodal generative AI lets you can crank you SEO spam-style content across all types of media, at almost any scale.
AI slop is just a more complete reimplementation of the "shovelware" from the 90s
Slop on social media also predates AI but at least back then someone had to make it… usually people in poorer countries using it to game algorithms for monetization.
We collectively have a virtually infinite collection of already existing hand crafted quality content filtered over the years in the form of children stories and tales that we can pick and chose from to read to our children. We love telling stories especially to our children.
Why would ANYONE be enticed by the idea of using AI to generate tales when there are so many out there to tap from is really beyond my comprehension.
The quality content in children's media does NOT survive through the ages. There are so many other incentives in children's publishing that quality for children is but one signal among many. Like how a parent will buy a book that teaches a 'good lesson' as a proxy for a good book, which is harder to determine.
On top of that, there are systems at play that limit the impact of curators who really put the work in to identify good children's books. For example, a children's librarian has to buy books through the city or county procurement process. Only certain vendors will have registered as a valid supplier to the procurement team, and then they have a chokehold on what can be bought for the library, so they can offer their shovelware with larger margin, along with a few compromises about the inclusion of known-good books.
And then to add to this, the rights to publish good books are more expensive, and require more work and negotiation.
Any parents who want an example of this should check out the works of Tomi Ungerer. Really some of the best picture books ever made, and often not available to be purchased at all. Phaidon, a niche and fancy publisher finally secured some rights, and is releasing some nice editions, but you won't find them in most public libraries. And even then, some of the his best work isn't available due to complications (like The Hat, only available in anthology or used books from the 70s)
This is so apparent as a parent that loves to read. It feels like things are even worse than Sturgeon's law would make you think.
Anyway, check out the caterpillar for the fifty-seventh time.
Yeah, it really does.
There is a mountain of human care and creativity to draw from; and nothing wrong with adding to the mountain.
But why bother with the statistical simulacra of the mountain (or raise your children on it).
And, for a large number of parents, "we" love sitting our children down in front a screen and letting it be their primary source of entertainment before they can even utter one word.
I'd bet that the majority of parents feeding their children AI slop don't even know it's AI slop because they couldn't identify it as such...even if they even cared to, which most of them don't.
I think the history of children's literature may be shorter than you think.
Afaik, parents are super protective of their children and would never do something that could inhibit a childs learning
I think a point missing is that this output all looks the same because the prompters are not specifying much more than the barest minimum to get what they want. If you just prompt "generate a cover for my book 100,000 whys which is childrens book that answers their questions about science" then you get images like from TFA using the models default style. However, the models are capable of reproducing any great artists style and any content you want.
If you have seen the prompts for images on communities of enthusiasts you may notice that they can be quite long and specify considerable detail about both the content and the style of the output.
Here is one of the four above the fold on the front page of CivitAI for me right now, it has both a positive and negative prompt. Not that long because this is a fairly simple image. However the image doesn't look like the slop in the 100,000 Why's book covers or the many commercial signs and advertisements I'm seeing when I leave the house.
Totalitarian as hell, but I don't see any other way.