I really think that a genAI picture book is like a microwave dinner. You can try to pick out a good one, but a corporation has done most of the deciding for you. Ultimately, it will not be as wholesome as something homemade, or as good as something made by an expert, and it will always taste like plastic.

Great workflow and a fantastic illustrations! Well done :)

There is something unsettling knowing that AI takes over literal parenting. I mean, I'm not trying to argue with your particular use case of AI, but the general idea that AI might be better at raising children than humans. Imagine knowing that if you give your child a tablet with AI and never speak to it, it'll turn out as a better human being than anything you could reasonably do manually.

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 lost it at the owl one. Tube shape. Skull. Big eye.

It's like surreal absurdist art.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes anthology by Bill Watterson - a formative part of every kid's childhood growing up in our house.

  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.

obviously, David Macaulay, The Way Things Work

So mainstream, it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work

I recently discovered Shinsuke Yoshitake:

"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.

keeping on theme: Tomi Ungerer, moon man https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Man-Tomi-Ungerer/dp/0714855987

Locomotive, by the similarly named Brian Floca, is also a masterpiece of detail and charm.

Kids grow up being lied to about everything. Back when I was a kid, my mom would threaten to call Batman if we were misbehaving. Today, there's TikTok videos we "call" where a "policeman" picks up and asks for the details of the misbehaving child.

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.

One of the scariest things to me about getting older is that there's entire generations younger than me who don't realize a growing number of things we used to have and lost. Because, like you said, they grew up without it.

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.

Most of the Whys are emitted by the reader upon gazing at the illustrations.

Perhaps modeled after the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Thousand_Whys

the lack of effort has been the main thing for me since this all started. you give people a tool to do something easier and instead of doing more WITH the tool they do this instead. is anyone out there using AI to make more higher quality children's books than were possible before?

As the other commenter here says, I suspect whoever did skim through found it amusing. Besides, it's not like this genre was particularly accurate anyway --- I have some old purely-manual-human examples of "how things work" books which distort, exaggerate, or grossly simplify for illustrative purposes.

Alternate theory: It's a best seller because it's so goofy. Much like brainrot and Dr Seuss.

The lack of effort is the point. This is the equivalent of SEO spam, meant to extract money from the ecosystem by crowding out books that earned their position in the marketplace.

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.

Because openai and other ai companies spend billions convincing people that they dont need to put in effort as long as they use AI. They literally think they are interacting with a hyperintelligence that is so smart it will destroy the planet eventually. Why would you spellcheck a digital god? Why not just push straight to publish and "automate" everything.

Over time, i hope the chickens come to roost.

The lack of effort is the point. The intent is to automate the entire pipeline and churn out huge numbers of these for whatever the top selling topic of the week is.

These are not made by people who care. It’s a scam basically. Spamming Amazon with slop is a current hustle culture thing. There’s guides, probably AI generated and not proofread, explaining how to do it. They obviously have tricks to game the rankings since these books get recommended like mad in every category.

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.

I assume these aren't being published by major publishing houses but rather microbrands and print-on-demand services. They're, like, bypassing gatekeepers and democratizing knowledge, man. Why do you hate freedom so much?

While I agree with your main point, this isn't exactly true.

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.

Some of the older quality content uses language which is now considered inappropriate. Of course, it wouldn't be hard to replace those words and there are plenty of books that do, but we can't just use the older books as they were.

By your logic, humans shouldn't write new children's books either, because there is already enough high-quality content already.

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/classrev/kipling.ht...

I think the history of children's literature may be shorter than you think.

> We love telling stories especially to our children.

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.

You could say that about pretty much any form of media, people just like new stuff more than old stuff. There's more 9 and 10/10 movies than most people would watch in their lifetime already but people will go see some forgettable trash movie in the theater instead.

In case you're not aware, 100,000 whys is a well-established name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Thousand_Whys

The category of thing is not new. The level of industrialization and quantity is new.

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.