[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/...

[pvillano]

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.

[JKCalhoun]

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

[cowlby]

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.

[blks]

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.

[meetingthrower]

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

[anal_reactor]

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.

[cowlby]

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.

[subscribed]

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.

[robocat]

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.

[dgudkov]

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.

[subscribed]

Great workflow and a fantastic illustrations! Well done :)