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I began this <\/span>morning, as I do every morning, by reading my daughter a book. Today it was Arthur Dorros\u2019 Abuela<\/a><\/em>, illustrated by Elisa Kleven. Abuela <\/em>is a sweet story about a girl who imagines that she and her grandmother leap into the sky and soar around New York City. Dorros does an elegant job weaving Spanish words and phrases throughout the text, often allowing readers to glean their meaning rather than translating them directly. When Rosalba, the bilingual granddaughter, discovers she can fly, she calls to her grandmother, \u201cVen, Abuela<\/em>. Come, Abuela.\u201d Her Spanish-speaking grandmother replies simply, \u201cS\u00ed, quiero volar<\/em>.\u201d Their language use reflects who they are\u2014a move that plenty of authors who write for adults fail to make.<\/p>\n Abuela <\/em>was one of my favorite books growing up, and it\u2019s one of my 2-year-old\u2019s favorites now. (And yes, we\u2019re reading my worn old copy.) She loves the idea of a flying grandma; she loves learning bits of what she calls Fanish<\/em>; she loves the bit when Rosalba and Abuela hitch a ride on an airplane, though she worries it might be too loud. Most of all, though, she loves Kleven\u2019s warm yet antic illustrations, which capture urban life in nearly pointillist detail. Every page gives her myriad things to look for and gives us myriad things to discuss. (Where are the dogs? What does Rosalba\u2019s t\u00edo<\/em> sell in his store? Why is it scary when airplanes are loud?) I\u2019ve probably read Abuela <\/em>200 times since we swiped it from my parents over the summer, and no two readings have been the same.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t start all my days with books as rich as Abuela<\/em>, though. Sometimes, my daughter chooses the books I wish she wouldn\u2019t: ones that have wandered into our house as gifts, or in a big stack someone was giving away, and that I have yet to purge. These books have garish, unappealing computer-rendered art. Some of them have nursery rhymes as text, and the rest have inane rhymes that don\u2019t quite add up to a story. One or two are Jewish holiday-oriented, and a couple more are tourist souvenirs. Not a single one of these books has a named author or illustrator. None of their publishers, all of which are quite small, responded to my requests for interviews, but I strongly suspect that these books were written and generated by AI\u2014and that I\u2019m not supposed to guess.<\/p>\n The maybe-AI book that has lasted the longest in our house is a badly illustrated Old MacDonald Has a Farm. <\/em>Its animals are inconsistently pixelated around the edges; the pink circles on its farmer\u2019s cheeks vary significantly in size from page to page, and his hands appear to have second thumbs instead of pinkies. All of these irregularities are signs of AI, according to the writer and illustrator Karen Ferreira, who runs an author coaching program called Children\u2019s Book Mastery<\/a>. On her program\u2019s site<\/a>, she warns that because AI cannot create a series of images using the same figures, it generates characters that are\u2014even if only subtly\u2014dissimilar from page to page. Noting this in our Old MacDonald<\/em>, I checked to see whether it was copyrighted, because the US copyright office has ruled out copyright for images created by machine learning. Where other board books have copyright symbols and information\u2014often the illustration and text copyright holders are different\u2014this one reads only, \u201cAll rights reserved.\u201d It\u2019s unclear what these \u201crights\u201d refer to, given that there is no named holder; it\u2019s possible that the publisher is gesturing at the design, but equally possible that the statement is a decoy with no legal meaning.<\/p>\n What makes a good children\u2019s book, and how much does it matter if a children\u2019s book is good?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n I have many objections to maybe-AI books like this one. They\u2019re ugly, whereas all our other children\u2019s books are whimsical, beautiful, or both. They aren\u2019t playful or sly or surprising. Their prose has no rhythm, in contrast to, let\u2019s say, Sandra Boynton\u2019s Barnyard Dance!<\/a> <\/em>and Dinosaur Dance!<\/a><\/em>, which have beats that inspire toddlers to leap up and perform. (The author-illustrator Mo Willems has said<\/a> children\u2019s books are \u201cmeant to be played, not just to be read.\u201d) They don\u2019t give my daughter much to notice or me much to riff on, which means she gets sick of them quickly. If she chooses one, she\u2019s often done with it in under a minute. It gives me a vague sting of guilt to donate such uninspiring books, but I still do, since the only other option is the landfill. I imagine they\u2019ll end up there anyway.<\/p>\n But I should admit that I also dislike the books that trigger my AI radar\u2014that uncanny-valley tingle you get when something just seems inhuman<\/em>\u2014out of bias. I am a writer and translator, a person whose livelihood is entirely centered and dependent on living in a society that values human creativity, and just the thought of a children\u2019s book generated by AI upsets me. Some months ago, I decided I wanted to know whether my bias was right. <\/em>After all, there are legions of bad children\u2019s books written and illustrated (or stock photo\u2013collaged) by humans. Are those books meaningfully and demonstrably different from AI ones? If they are, how big a threat is AI to quality children\u2019s publishing, and does it also threaten children\u2019s learning? In a sense, my questions\u2014not all of which are answerable\u2014boil down to this: What makes a good children\u2019s book, and how much does it matter if a children\u2019s book is good?<\/p>\n I\u2019m not the <\/span>only one worried about this. My brother- and sister-in-law, proud Minnesotans, recently sent us a book called Count On Minnesota<\/a><\/em>\u2014state merch, precisely the sort of thing that\u2019s set my AI alarms ringing in the past\u2014whose publisher, Gibbs Smith, includes a warning on the back beside the copyright notice: \u201cNo part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies and systems.\u201d Count On Minnesota <\/em>is nearly wordless and has no named author, but the names of its artist and designer, Nicole LaRue and Brynn Evans, sit directly below the AI statement, reminding readers who will be harmed if Count On Minnesota <\/em>gets scraped to train large vision models despite its copyright language.<\/p>\n In this sense, children\u2019s literature is akin to the many, many other fields that generative AI threatens. There\u2019s a danger that machines will take authors\u2019 and illustrators\u2019 jobs, and the data sets on which they were trained have already taken tremendous amounts of intellectual property. Larry Law, executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association<\/a>, told me that his organization\u2019s member stores are against AI-created books\u2014and, as a matter of policy, refuse to stock anything they suspect or know was generated by a large language or vision model\u2014because \u201cas an association, we value artists and authors and publishers and fundamentally believe that AI steals from artists.\u201d Still, Law and many of GLIBA\u2019s members are comfortable using AI to streamline workflow. So are many publishers. Both corporate publishing houses and some reputable independent ones are at least beginning to use AI to create the marketing bibles called tip sheets and other internal sales documents. According to industry sources I spoke to on background, some corporate publishers are also testing large language and vision models\u2019 capacities to create children\u2019s books, but their attempts aren\u2019t reaching the market. The illustrations aren\u2019t good enough yet, and it\u2019s still easier to have a human produce text than to make a person coach and edit a large language model.<\/p>\n \u201cKids are weird! They\u2019re joyfully <\/em>weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Other publishers, meanwhile, are shying away. Dan Brewster, owner of Prologue Bookshop<\/a> in Columbus, Ohio\u2014a shop with an explicit anti-AI policy<\/a>\u2014told me, \u201cThe publisher partners we work with every day have not done anything to make me suspect them\u201d of generating text or illustrations with AI; many, he added, have told him, \u201c\u2018You\u2019re never going to see that from us.\u2019\u201d (Whether that\u2019s true, of course, remains to be seen.) In contrast, Brewster has grown more cautious in his acquisitions of self-published books and those released by very small independent presses. He sees these as higher AI risks, as does Timothy Otte, a co-owner and buyer at Minneapolis\u2019 Wild Rumpus<\/a>, a beloved 33-year-old children\u2019s bookstore. Its legacy and reach, he says, means they \u201cget both traditionally published authors and self-published authors reaching out asking you to stock their book. That was true before AI was in the picture. Now, some of those authors that are reaching out, it is clear that what they\u2019re pitching to me was at least partly, if not entirely, generated by AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Otte always says no, both on the grounds Law described and because the books are no good. The art often has not just inconsistencies, but errors: Rendering models aren\u2019t great at getting the right number of toes on a paw. The text can be equally full of mistakes, as children\u2019s librarian Sondra Eklund writes in a horrified blog post<\/a> about acquiring a book about rabbits from children\u2019s publisher Bold Kids, only to discover that she\u2019d bought an AI book so carelessly produced that it informs readers that rabbits \u201ccan even make their own clothes\u2026and can help you out with gardening.\u201d (Reviews of Bold Kids\u2019 hundreds of books on Amazon suggest that its rabbit book isn\u2019t the only one with such issues. Bold Kids did not respond to repeated efforts to reach them for comment.) The text of more edited AI books, meanwhile, tends to condescend to young readers. Otte often sees books whose authors have \u201cdecided that there is a moral that they want to give to children, and they have asked a large language model to spit out a picture book that shows a kid coming up against some sort of problem and being given a moral solution.\u201d In his experience, that isn\u2019t what children want or how they learn. \u201cKids are weird!\u201d Otte says. \u201cThey\u2019re joyfully <\/em>weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross. The number of times I\u2019ve seen kids make a stank face at a book that\u2019s telling them how to be!\u201d<\/p>\n AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But is a lazy, moralizing AI book any worse than a lazy, moralizing one written by a person? When I put this question to Otte, the only distinction he could come up with was the \u201cancillary ethical concerns of water usage and the environmental impact that a large language model currently has.\u201d Other book buyers, though, pointed out that while AI can imitate a particular writer or designer\u2019s style or mash multiple perspectives together, it cannot have a point of view of its own. Plenty of big publishers create picture books and board books\u2014which are simple, sturdy texts printed on cardstock heavy enough to be gnawed on by a teething 8-month-old\u2014in-house, using stock photos and releasing them without an author\u2019s name. Very rarely is the result much good, and yet each publisher does have its own visual signature. If you\u2019re a millennial, you can likely close your eyes and summon the museum-text layout of the pages in a DK Eyewitness book. It\u2019s idiosyncratic even if it\u2019s not particularly special. To deny our children even that is to assume, in a sense, that they <\/em>have no point of view: that they can\u2019t tell one book from another and wouldn\u2019t care if they could.<\/p>\n Frankly, though, I\u2019m less concerned with the gap between bad AI and bad human than I am with the yawning chasm between bad AI and good human, since bad children\u2019s books by humans are the ones more likely to become rarer or cease existing. If rendering models get good enough that corporate publishers stop asking humans to slap together, let\u2019s say, stock-photo books about ducks, those books could, in theory, vanish. That doesn\u2019t mean Robert McCloskey\u2019s canonical, beautiful Make Way for Ducklings<\/a> <\/em>will go out of print. But it\u2019s much less expensive to publish a book that was written years ago than it is to pay an author and illustrator for something new. It\u2019s also less expensive to print a picture book like Make Way for Ducklings <\/em>than a board book, with its heavier paper and nontoxic (again: gnawing baby) inks. AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct.<\/p>\n Only instinct and imagination can tell you what Sandra Boynton means when she writes in \u2018Dinosaur Dance!\u2019\u00a0that \u201cIguanodon goes dibbidy DAH.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n It doesn\u2019t help that everyone from parents to publishers is susceptible to undervaluing board books. It\u2019s very difficult to argue that the quality of a picture book doesn\u2019t matter, since they are the ones that most children use to learn to read. But it\u2019s easy to dismiss board books, which are intended for children not only too young to read, but too young to even follow a story. Can\u2019t we just show a baby anything? According to Dr. John Hutton<\/a>, a pediatrician and former children\u2019s bookstore owner who researches the impact reading at home has on toddlers\u2019 brain function and development, we shouldn\u2019t. In fact, we should avoid reading our kids anything that bores us. <\/em>Beginning in utero, one of the greatest benefits of shared reading is bonding, and unsurprisingly, Hutton has found that the more engaged parents are in the book they\u2019ve chosen, the greater its impact on that front. But reading to babies is also important, he explained, because the more words a child hears, the greater their receptive and expressive vocabularies (that is, the words they know and can say) will be. This, starting around age 1, lets parents and children discuss the books they\u2019re reading, a process that Hutton told me \u201cbuilds social cognition and later dovetails with empathy.\u201d It does this by training children\u2019s brains to connect language to emotion\u2014and to do so through imagination.<\/p>\n Hutton presented this as vital neurological work. \u201cNothing in the brain comes for free,\u201d he told me, \u201cand unless you practice empathy skills\u2014connecting, getting along, feeling what others are feeling\u2014you\u2019re not going to have as well-developed neural infrastructure to be able to do that.\u201d It\u2019s also a social equalizer. Research has shown that reading aloud exposes children whose parents have lower income levels or educational backgrounds to more words and kinds of syntax than they might otherwise hear\u2014and, Hutton notes, this isn\u2019t a question of proper <\/em>syntax. Rather, what matters here is creativity. Some of the best board books out there bend or even invent language\u2014only instinct and imagination can tell you what Boynton means when she writes in Dinosaur Dance!<\/em> that \u201cIguanodon goes dibbidy DAH\u201d\u2014and this teaches their little listeners how to do the same.<\/p>\n Of course, not all good board books\u2019 strength is linguistic. Ideally, Hutton says, a book\u2019s text and illustrations should \u201crecruit both the language and visual parts of your brain to work together to understand what\u2019s going on.\u201d From ages 6 months to 18 months, my daughter was enamored with books from Camilla Reid and Ingela Arrhenius\u2019 Peekaboo<\/em><\/a> series, which have minimal text, cheery yet sophisticated illustrations, and a pop-up or slider on each page. My daughter loved it when I read Peekaboo Pumpkin<\/a> <\/em>to her, but she also loved learning to manipulate it herself. It was visually and tactilely appealing enough to become not just a book, but a toy\u2014and it was sturdy enough to do so. She\u2019s got plenty of other books with pop-ups, but Peekaboo Pumpkin <\/em>and Peekaboo Lion<\/a> <\/em>are the only ones she hasn\u2019t more or less destroyed.<\/p>\n Reid and Arrhenius publish with Nosy Crow<\/a>, a London-based independent press. I reached out to ask if the company was concerned about AI threatening its business and got an emphatic no from its preschool publishing director and senior art director, Tor England and Zo\u00eb Gregory. England immediately highlighted the physical durability of Nosy Crow\u2019s books. \u201cWe believe in a book as an object people want to own,\u201d she said, rather than one meant to be disposable. They invest in them accordingly: England and Gregory visit Arrhenius in Sweden to discuss new ideas and often spend two or three years working on a book. Neither fears that AI could compete with the quality of such painstaking work, which, for the most part, is entirely analog. Some of Nosy Crow\u2019s books do make sounds, though\u2014something I generally hate, but I make an exception for the shockingly realistic toddler giggle in What\u2019s That Noise? Meow! <\/a><\/em>Gregory told me that while working on that book, she couldn\u2019t find a laugh she liked in the sound libraries Nosy Crow normally uses, so she went home, set her iPhone to record, and tickled her daughter.<\/p>\n A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But somebody shopping on Amazon won\u2019t hear that giggle. Nor can an online shopper identify a shoddily printed book, which may well be cheaper than Nosy Crow\u2019s but will certainly withstand less tugging and chewing before it falls apart. A risk that Otte and the other buyers I spoke to identified\u2014and while it serves booksellers\u2019 interests to say this, it is also an entirely reasonable projection\u2014is that while independent bookstores and well-curated libraries will continue to stock high-quality books like Nosy Crow\u2019s, Amazon, which is both the largest book retailer and the largest self-publishing service in the nation, will grow ever fuller of AI dreck. If corporate publishers turn to AI to write and illustrate their board books, this strikes me as very likely to occur. It would mean that parents with the time and resources to browse in person would be likely to provide significantly higher-quality books to their pre-reading-age children than parents searching for \u201ctrain book for toddlers\u201d<\/em> online. A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite.<\/p>\n In Empire of AI<\/em>, journalist Karen Hao writes that technology revolutions \u201cpromise to deliver progress [but have a] tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable.\u201d She argues that this is \u201cperhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence.\u201d The key word here is perhaps.<\/em> As of now, AI children\u2019s books are on the fringes of publishing. Large publishers can choose to keep them that way. Doing so would be a statement of conviction that the quality and humanity of children\u2019s books matter, no matter how young the child in question is. When I asked Hutton, the pediatrician, what worried him most about AI books, he mentioned the example of \u201clazy writing\u201d they set, which he fears might disincentivize both hard work and creativity. He also pointed to an often-cited MIT study showing that writing with ChatGPT dampened creativity and less fully activated the brain\u2014that is, it\u2019s bad for the authors, not just the readers. Then he said, \u201cYou know, there are things we can do versus things we should do as a society, and that\u2019s where we struggle, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n On this front, I hope to see no more struggle. We should not give our children, whose brains are vulnerable and malleable, books created by computers. We shouldn\u2019t give them books created carelessly. That\u2019s up to parents and teachers, yes\u2014but it\u2019s also up to authors, illustrators, designers, and publishers. Gregory told me that \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of love and warmth and heart\u201d that goes into the books she works on. Rejecting AI is a first step toward a landscape of children\u2019s publishing where that\u2019s always true.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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