Forty-one years ago, the late singer, songwriter, and education activist Whitney Houston urged us to teach children and let them lead the way.
Decades later, some believe that this means instructing kids to use scissors as forks; teaching them that zookeepers can sweep under water; and leading them to believe that magical, mystical, rainbow-hunting unicorns speak like an HR manager delivering a performance review.
There’s also video after video and post after post claiming that it’s not just easy to write and illustrate a children’s book using AI prompts, but also that you can make thousands of dollars doing so.
The good news for authors and illustrators — as well as parents who do not want their children to eat salad with office supplies — is that AI in kids’ books is still relatively easy to spot, particularly in illustrations. But the willingness of so many adults to outsource such a foundational and joyful piece of childhood to a computer speaks to a bigger issue: the fundamental misunderstanding of what makes children’s books meaningful and distinctly human.
Children’s books are about how much we respect children
Books are often the first pieces of art that adults — who were all children at one point in their lives — bestow on the next generation. They’re also the way we teach children about the way the world works, whether that’s the ABCs, shapes and colors, or how to be a good person.
There’s a misconception that because kids are young, they might not notice or appreciate quality in their literature the way that grown-ups perceive it in work made for adults. That type of thinking not only underestimates how smart kids are, but is also an abdication of the responsibility adults have to nurture and inspire young people. Kids deserve art that was created and chosen for them intentionally, by people who are actively thinking about the way the child will receive it.
AI “cannot make a conscious choice,” Megan Kearney, an artist who teaches children’s book illustration at a college level, told me. “It’s giving you things that look similar to other things. It’s giving you things that fit into certain trends, but there’s no conscious decision-making happening.” To write or illustrate a book for kids, “you really need to be someone who cares about the development of children, their emotional development, and their intellectual development,” Kearney said.
Despite how AI appears to make writing and drawing children’s books seem easy, doing it well actually takes an enormous amount of skill. The people who do it professionally are dedicated to understanding how children process information, and know how to connect words and pictures in a way that will resonate with a young reader.
“If you’re willing to take shortcuts, you’re probably not fully engaging with any of those things or those children either,” she added, noting this is exactly what she tells her students. “If people don’t care enough to make a thing — anything — why would anyone care enough to read it?”
The idea that AI could somehow generate a thoughtful story accompanied by beautiful, moving art is not only disrespectful to the artists creating these books, but to the children reading them, Kearney said. “You’re really underestimating the intelligence of your readers,” Kearney said. “You have not spent enough time with this medium to know enough to identify what is good and what is bad, and now you are producing it without that knowledge.”
It’s fairly easy to avoid AI children’s books (for now)
If you’re motivated to avoid AI-generated books right now, it’s actually pretty achievable. But it requires adults to be conscious, savvy readers.
“Because kids can’t control their access, they’re not making those purchasing choices; adults are doing that,” Kearney said. “If a parent is the gateway or an adult is the gateway to what kids have access to — that will be what shapes their tastes and that will shape how they develop.”
Essentially, choosing books for kids has to be a conscious decision; if you’re doing it mindlessly, it’s more likely that the books you choose will be a bit mindless too. And further, if books are a way children learn about our world and how to exist in it, do we really want them basing this fundamental knowledge on something a machine spat out?
“We already have a lot of bad books out there. We don’t need a bad book machine!”
— Megan Kearney, an artist who teaches children’s book illustration at a college level
The good news is that you probably aren’t going to find AI-generated books in a bookstore at the moment. The experts I spoke to said that these books are usually the product of self-publishing and mostly live on Amazon. That may explain why so many of the ones you see people discussing online were presents from relatives or friends (who might be looking to buy quick gifts online) or show up in dentists’ or doctors’ offices. If you’re not physically paging through a book, it’s harder to spot AI.
Buyers for bookstores, and especially indie shops, are more discerning, experts say.
“The thing about independent bookstores is that these people have their finger on the pulse. They all chat with each other,” Rex Ogle, an author who writes children’s and middle grade books as well as comics and graphic novels, told me. “If someone says, This book is AI, they’ll be like, Let’s take this off our shelves. Because independent bookstores, in my opinion, are very much the last refuge supporting writers.”
Ogle also said that major publishers currently have no-AI clauses in their contracts with authors and illustrators. For now, he says, the feeling among him and his cohort is cautious but not quite paranoid. What worries him is a future in which publishers loosen those restrictions because they see AI as a way to cut costs.
“Books do not pay very well, so I need to write a lot to pay my bills,” he said, noting that he’s published 17 books in six years. “What happens when someone sits down at their laptop and has AI write an entire 240-page graphic novel that takes me weeks, sometimes months to write, and they can do it in an afternoon?”
The impact could be even more devastating, he says, on artists, because illustrations usually take more time than text does, which might incentivize publishers (and even writers) to use AI instead. Ogle also said that some of his writer colleagues have, in private conversations, told him they’ve used AI to help generate an outline or the start of a story — a use he feels strongly against.
“I think there are writers who are like, I would never use AI except for the outline, or helping me put the script together and then I go back through and clean it up and again, to me, that’s cheating,” Ogle said. “That’s like having a robot run the football field, and then at the last minute you step in for the touchdown.”
Kearney, the illustrator, is slightly more hopeful.
She believes that kids will genuinely want to read things that they enjoy. AI, in its current state, can’t deliver that — no matter what self-publishers are telling their followers. Kids aren’t going to have a personal, internal moment with a book that a computer put together for the same reason that adults aren’t.
To be clear, just because something is human-made doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Not every book is going to be great, and not every author or illustrator is going to knock it out of the park every single time out. Again, that’s why it’s worth actually looking at the books you’re buying for kids, and making an earnest attempt to choose something you think is worthy, even if you need to buy online. But creating original work, even if it’s awful, is still important to Kearney.
“We already have a lot of bad books out there,” Kearney added. “We don’t need a bad book machine!”
