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AI children's books, body horror edition

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Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#51

Post by cowlby »

This just seems like laziness vs AI = bad. It's not like publishers are putting out masterpieces with human writing. They're cranking out minimum viable content as well.

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/...

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#52

Post by LooseMarmoset »

defrost wrote: post #40
awakeasleep wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Moon ( 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 bel…

That is a great book. All my kids loved it.

"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.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#53

Post by hackingonempty »

>Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content. This makes the output easy to spot even if all the individual pieces are perfect facsimiles of what a human could create:

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.

https://civitai.com/images/134444826

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#54

Post by vunderba »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #28

This seems like an opportunity to celebrate great children's books created with craft and care by humans. I'll start: John Rocco, How We Got to the Moon . ( http://www.howwegottothemoon.com/ )

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.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#55

Post by mcphage »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #28

This seems like an opportunity to celebrate great children's books created with craft and care by humans. I'll start: John Rocco, How We Got to the Moon . ( http://www.howwegottothemoon.com/ )

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

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#58

Post by zerobees »

robertclaus wrote: post #2

The lack of real effort bothers me more than the content itself. We can't be bothered to even proofread children's books anymore?

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.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#59

Post by RealityVoid »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #28

This seems like an opportunity to celebrate great children's books created with craft and care by humans. I'll start: John Rocco, How We Got to the Moon . ( http://www.howwegottothemoon.com/ )

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.

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