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?

I think its always been a thing. Give a society any new technology and the distribution curve of human effort doesn’t disappear: a slice of people will aim it at entertainment, shortcuts, and the lowest common denominator (this book), and a smaller slice with high discipline and curiousity will use the exact same tools to become 10x more capable. The tech changes; the distribution of how people use it mostly doesn’t

I don't think there has ever been an appetite amongst corporations to improve the quality of their products if they can easily get away with reducing costs.

People were not given a tool to do something easier. That is not how it was promoted or sold. And that is not why businesses pay for AI. AI was sold as a tool to replace people and do things on the cheap. A person is attached to it as an accountability sink, that is it.

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.