AI children's books, body horror edition • Hacker News Board

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#81

Post by meetingthrower » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

blks wrote: post #80

cowlby wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't disagree, there is a scale/volume problem I wanted to solve. If I read to my kids 365 days a year for 8-10 years, that's over 3,500 books. There's a lot of crap publishing out there just cause it's "natural" or "human" does not make it good. So yes we read the classics, but it's great to have a fun creative book factory.

Well, it will never be 3500 books. One book often lasts longer than one day, and kids love rereading the same story over and over and over and over again.

Right? Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon? Probably 1K times between my two kids.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#82

Post by api » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

altmanaltman wrote: post #19

api wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 destroy…

I understand you can use AI to make a good book but you can also make a good book without AI. Why does AI have to be involved at all? Were we running out of children books that we need to optimize a factory assembly line for them with AI? 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…

The point I was making is that this isn't bad AI books made by people trying to make books. This is scam content made by spammers and hustlers.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#83

Post by dgudkov » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

cowlby wrote: post #51

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…

It's not laziness. It's a shift of burden (bullshit checks) to the consumer. That burden is not trivial. It takes time and energy, so it's much better for the society when people don't have to do it often. LLMs (will) increase that burden by orders of magnitude as we're going to experience bullshittification of pretty much everything - entertainment, services, software, gadgets, science & research, healthcare, lawmaking, etc.