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  • 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
  • If only I could get some NFT's of this wonderful art.
    by overgard
  • 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
  • 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
  • How does a 120 page book contain 100,000 Whys? That's 833 Whys per page.
    by geor9e
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

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