Can AI Replace Children's Book Illustrators?

AI-generated picture books for children are getting better with time. Illustrators tell us how they feel about this development

- Somak Ghoshal

In the late 1990s, when Sudeshna Shome Ghosh was working with Puffin, the children's imprint of Penguin Books India (now Penguin Random House India), she had an opportunity to publish one of the most exciting books of her career.

"The Puffin Book of Magical Indian Myths (2000) by Anita Nair was a big book for us—one of the first of its kind to retell Indian mythology for young readers," says the editor and writer.

She commissioned Atanu Roy, one of India's finest illustrators and cartoonists, to illustrate it. "His approach was 'old-school', he took no shortcuts, and worked on each illustration for as long as he needed to," Shome Ghosh adds. "Anita would lose patience once in a while, but then, Atanu would send an image, and it would be mind-blowing."

The piece de resistance was the depiction of Lord Vishnu's matsya (fish) avatar for the cover, which remains iconic to this day. "It was a different era," Shome Ghosh adds. "If you needed time to produce good work, you could afford to take it."

Cut to 2025, and you can write a children's book in a weekend and publish it. All you need to do is compose a prompt for an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, provide a skeleton of a plot, along with a few references for illustrations, and you will have your illustrated book ready in a few hours.

All in all, AI can do a passably good job—but more often than not, it is hit and miss.

"Although AI-generated images often have a highly finished and rendered quality, I am yet to see an AI-enabled book that offers consistency of style and design throughout," writer and illustrator Pankaj Saikia says. "But considering the speed at which it is evolving, it won't be long before AI is able to produce better quality books."

GEN AI AS AUTHOR