alt.hn

6/26/2026 at 1:15:14 AM

AI children's books, body horror edition

 https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/ai-childrens-books-body-horror-edition

by surprisetalk

6/26/2026 at 3:35:02 AM

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/...

by cowlby

6/26/2026 at 9:31:37 AM

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.

by pvillano

6/26/2026 at 12:24:17 PM

Fake plastic trees…

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

by JKCalhoun

6/26/2026 at 2:28:41 PM

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.

by cowlby

6/26/2026 at 3:21:35 PM

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.

by blks

6/26/2026 at 7:06:08 PM

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

by meetingthrower

6/26/2026 at 9:36:45 AM

Great workflow and a fantastic illustrations! Well done :)

by subscribed

6/26/2026 at 9:28:50 PM

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.

by dgudkov

6/26/2026 at 6:43:10 AM

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.

by anal_reactor

6/26/2026 at 7:29:50 AM

Now that's a Black Mirror episode. It's the story of all technology though, caveat emptor.

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.

by cowlby

6/26/2026 at 9:34:35 AM

There's something deeply disturbing seeing you start with

"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.

by subscribed

6/26/2026 at 7:24:35 AM

Tht whole tone of your comment is just unsettling implications and fabulations.

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.

by robocat

6/26/2026 at 2:27:53 AM

For a moment I entertained the idea that these are intentionally bad to get people to buy them as gag gifts. My kids and I certainly had a good laugh looking at the pictures in blog. That second picture of the jaw sticking out had my son ROFL-ing.

by rdtsc

6/26/2026 at 2:59:43 AM

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

It's like surreal absurdist art.

by userbinator

6/26/2026 at 3:00:29 AM

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/)

by cfmcdonald

6/26/2026 at 5:36:54 AM

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.

by RealityVoid

6/26/2026 at 3:42:49 AM

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.

by vunderba

6/26/2026 at 3:12:26 AM

obviously, David Macaulay, The Way Things Work

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

by AceJohnny2

6/26/2026 at 2:07:43 PM

I’m so lucky to have had a copy of this as a kid. Loved that book. It really let you understand how all kinds of things worked, with beautiful illustrations you could pore over for hours. Thanks for reminding me of it.

by donkey_brains

6/26/2026 at 3:08:39 AM

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

by awakeasleep

6/26/2026 at 3:17:41 AM

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 believed it lacked a meaningful narrative structure and educational value.

)

by defrost

6/26/2026 at 3:35:42 AM

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.

by LooseMarmoset

6/26/2026 at 1:27:12 PM

She’s not wrong. But it’s still a great book for kids, for reasons entirely unknown to me. (Parent of 7)

by K0balt

6/26/2026 at 3:44:43 AM

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

by mcphage

6/26/2026 at 2:35:26 AM

I've been wondering what the long term result on peoples perceptions of reality will be after all this AI slop. I've noticed a lot of the times I can spot AI slop videos because they just don't match what I know to be true, I can think "That's an AI video of a fox because I know foxes don't act/move like that" But then the only reason I know that is because I've seen hundreds of videos on the internet before AI generated video was a thing. But someone who grew up seeing AI slop from the start doesn't have that firm grasp on reality to spot fake content from.

by Gigachad

6/26/2026 at 10:18:44 AM

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.

by muzani

6/26/2026 at 2:44:06 PM

> After 40, people become gullible again. FB is full of people who think an actual Ghibli clip is 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

by red-iron-pine

6/26/2026 at 3:08:24 AM

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.

by gdulli

6/26/2026 at 6:50:49 AM

I did read somewhere that Gen X are the last gen in modern societies to see anything real. Everything is just a simulation of older things. All the stupid bars nd cafes with rustic wood and old timey aesthetics for example.

by smackeyacky

6/26/2026 at 9:31:22 AM

> All the stupid bars nd cafes with rustic wood and old timey aesthetics for example.

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

by aembleton

6/26/2026 at 2:45:10 PM

i mean i can find an art-deco "speakeasy" downtown right now, today. novelty trumps nostalgia

by red-iron-pine

6/26/2026 at 3:06:21 AM

How does a 120 page book contain 100,000 Whys? That's 833 Whys per page.

by geor9e

6/26/2026 at 3:50:51 AM

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

by userbinator

6/26/2026 at 4:37:00 AM

I wish I could upvote you 10 times.

by _carbyau_

6/26/2026 at 2:16:30 AM

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

by robertclaus

6/26/2026 at 2:42:56 AM

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?

by NothingAboutAny

6/26/2026 at 2:56:04 AM

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

by kaizenite

6/26/2026 at 2:59:41 AM

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.

by supriyo-biswas

6/26/2026 at 11:10:41 AM

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.

by watwut

6/26/2026 at 3:05:48 AM

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.

by userbinator

6/26/2026 at 4:40:59 AM

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.

by zerobees

6/26/2026 at 10:05:42 AM

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

by muzani

6/26/2026 at 2:47:16 AM

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.

by altmanaltman

6/26/2026 at 3:04:50 AM

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.

by crooked-v

6/26/2026 at 2:41:13 AM

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.

by api

6/26/2026 at 2:51:26 AM

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). In fact, its almost entirely about the concept and direct execution.

You mention vibe coding but this is fundamentally different and it doesnt apply

by altmanaltman

6/26/2026 at 8:05:39 PM

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.

by api

6/26/2026 at 2:19:24 AM

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?

by Analemma_

6/26/2026 at 2:48:21 AM

Yes we should celebrate these plucky entrepreneurs!

by JSR_FDED

6/26/2026 at 2:48:29 AM

There was a window where new authors could break in with blogging and self publishing. Andy Weir (The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and the bad one that shall not be named) got started this way I think.

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.

by api

6/26/2026 at 2:23:02 AM

the slop must flow

by Avicebron

6/26/2026 at 3:22:58 AM

If only I could get some NFT's of this wonderful art.

by overgard

6/26/2026 at 3:15:55 PM

Not sure why author doesn’t like to openly share his thoughts on the exact model used and book titles - one book is named, but the rest are blurred?

by blks

6/26/2026 at 3:23:15 AM

Just like Vibe coding, I think this article is trying to convey that, when children’s books important not to rely solely on AI, but to consciously strive to create high-quality works.

by hasudon7171

6/26/2026 at 2:53:16 AM

The concept of consuming AI generated content for children has always baffled me.

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.

by Paria_Stark

6/26/2026 at 3:01:39 AM

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.

by awakeasleep

6/26/2026 at 3:27:15 AM

Sturgeon’s law is absolutely true. Just look at the religious ideas and worldviews children have been taught for thousands of years, and at the hatred, wars, massacres, and slavery religion has brought into the world. Modern dictatorships like North Korea and China also subject children to carefully engineered indoctrination. I think modern AI, and future AI guided by humans, can do much better than Sturgeon’s law would suggest.

by slowpacket

6/26/2026 at 3:13:57 AM

Look, you get the hungry caterpillar, and you get fifty gallons of slop (AI or human, does it really matter?)

Anyway, check out the caterpillar for the fifty-seventh time.

by bombcar

6/26/2026 at 3:32:29 AM

> AI or human, does it really matter?

Yeah, it really does.

by mcphage

6/26/2026 at 3:06:27 AM

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

by raincole

6/26/2026 at 3:16:06 AM

No, because the premise resides in the fact that human care and creativity is what makes the value.

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).

by gyomu

6/26/2026 at 9:35:04 AM

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 aembleton

6/26/2026 at 3:22:18 AM

> 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.

by ElProlactin

6/26/2026 at 2:58:31 AM

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.

by thatguy0900

6/26/2026 at 2:41:18 AM

Slop aimed towards children has practically _always_ existed. The "100,000 whys" naming reminds me of an old "700000 games" CD

AI slop is just a more complete reimplementation of the "shovelware" from the 90s

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

by blharr

6/26/2026 at 2:44:39 AM

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.

by api

6/26/2026 at 3:30:07 AM

For parents-whats the benefit of this?

Afaik, parents are super protective of their children and would never do something that could inhibit a childs learning

by JimsonYang

6/26/2026 at 3:40:37 AM

>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

by hackingonempty

6/26/2026 at 2:42:37 AM

Those pictures make me think of Attack on Titan for some reason.

by aaronbrethorst

6/26/2026 at 2:45:49 AM

Sometimes I feel we need to accelerate this trend. We need to collectively drown in a tsunami of slop. Only then will we decide to value quality.

by JSR_FDED

6/26/2026 at 2:55:30 AM

[dead]

by ihsw

6/26/2026 at 2:33:42 AM

There are some things that I feel really shouldn't be enshitified by AI and this is one of them. Sad world TBH.

by hasteg

6/26/2026 at 2:30:08 AM

reminds me the meme that a man hiding in the vending machine...

by luciana1u

6/26/2026 at 3:00:04 AM

This has been bothering me too. When I borrow a new kid's book from the library I now wonder if the illustration or text were computer generated.

by esafak

6/26/2026 at 2:39:46 AM

[dead]

by ihsw

6/26/2026 at 3:06:50 AM

The only way this ends well is that we end up with extreme regulations in all places to enforce ownership, from software (because of insecure code due to excessive vibe coding) to children's books (because we end up teaching them crap).

Totalitarian as hell, but I don't see any other way.

by supriyo-biswas