So, I had an employer give me a children's book to upload to Amazon. If you aren't familiar with this process, there were two major mistakes she made that caused her to hire me, and these are the main reason I get hired: (1) Amazon paperback books have to have a minimum number of pages--24 pages for a paperback and 75 for a hardcover. If you have fewer pages than this, you will get an error.
You can fix this by writing more or by only putting out a Kindle ebook. In her case, since she had done a children's picture book with relatively few pictures, I had her give me more pictures, which is another option for expanding content. You cannot simply add 20 blank pages to your 4 page book. Kindle will not allow this and will flag you if you try to do this.
Now, adding more pictures can be a problem if you commissioned a set of pictures and you would have to pay to have more created. I could have taken the pictures she had and photoshopped some of them to change them enough to be another picture for the book if necessary. This would have probably been cheaper than if she commissioned entirely new artwork for which she wanted all the rights. (When you commission artwork for a children's book, you have to make sure the person creating the art knows what you intend to do with it, and I recommend signing a contract with the person that states it is okay for you to use the work in that way.)
She, however, bypassed the above trouble because all her pictures were AI generated. Now, bypassing the above trouble by using AI is not necessarily a good alternative. Although it was relatively easy to go back into the program and spit out 5 or so more pictures, the pictures were awful. I am not talking about just the new pictures. All the pictures were awful. There were five-legged cats and one chipmunk had a foot instead of a tail. The animals were not proportional to each other--with a giant rat towering over a small skunk. One picture had a happy woodland creature returning to its home--except there as a demon or something that looked like a demon with evil teeth and empty eyes waiting on the porch.
There are plenty of critiques of AI-generated children's book art, so I won't go into all the details, but in addition to the above, the main characters did not look the same from page to page.
You may think--what does a 4-year old care about real art? And, to some extent this is true. However, as an adult with children there are several things I know--one is that if I don't like reading a children's book to my kids, it will "disappear." I also believe that a parent's primary goal should be to educate their children so they can become participating members of society. If they learn at 4 that there is nothing wrong with five-legged cats (or worse they learn not to scrutinize art), they are never going to have a sense of when it is okay to actually draw a five-legged cat (i.e. for the cover of some fantasy novel that contains a creature that looks like a five-legged cat). If we don't teach kids the rules, they will grow up unable to follow any of them or to know when is a pointed time to break them. We feed into the Tiktok society where they only read headlines, scan clickbait articles, and watch brief, poorly-done video clips on repeat.
We are already reaping the rewards of giving children "participation" rewards for doing nothing and not rewarding children who actually achieved things because we wouldn't want their peers to be jealous. What we have created are adults who have no reason to try to accomplish anything because someone will cheer them on regardless and the government or their parents will give them everything they need to survive without effort. These adults get a job but don't work.
With the AI binge and no gatekeeper, our next generation of kids will no longer care about good artwork or good literature. They won't have attention spans long enough to bother with it.
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