I (Accidentally) Bought An AI-Generated Book

Seven-toed children, October 13th, and a social media firestorm | No. 013

Disclosure: This piece is a departure from my regular Substack topics of parenting, foster care, adoption, and motherhood.

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

It’s October 13th and this is post No. 013. In western culture, many people have superstitions around the number 13, perceiving it as unlucky or ominous.* In fact, over 80% of high-rise hotels in the U.S.A. don’t even have a 13th floor because no guests want to stay there. In honor of Halloween month and the unlucky numbers aligning, I thought I’d share a spooky story. Want to know what it’s about? I bought an AI-generated book on accident earlier this week. If that doesn’t spook you, well, you might not be a writer.

My baby turned 4 months old a couple weeks ago and recently started boycotting naps (also a very spooky tale, but not the one for today). The four-month sleep regression has descended upon us, despite my instructions to the baby that she wasn’t allowed to engage in this dreaded phase.

We have been slightly more successful with naps if they happen in the car. Earlier this week was another baby-boycotts-her-naps day. Therefore, several hours after a needed nap time and lots of tears and blank stares later (for mom or baby? Who’s asking?), we loaded up into the car to see if a drive would do the trick.

The drive to Barnes and Noble is about 15 minutes from our house which is usually enough time for the baby to fall asleep. By the time we arrived, she was still zombie-eyed baby in the backseat, and she definitely wasn’t sleeping. I was already bleary-eyed myself from trying to get a tired baby to nap, but I gave up and decided to go in anyway and wander around. 

I pushed the stroller inside the store, and I immediately saw a writer had a table set up near the front entrance. I’ve been trying to work on my own writing projects this past month, and I’ve been in a strong support-other-writers mood lately. I saw this author sitting at a table with their pile of children’s books for sale. This person was sitting with someone else, presumably their partner. The writer had a fun colorful shirt on with some bookish phrase across the front. I didn’t even think any further than to walk over to the table and grab a copy of their book.

The author giggled and smiled as I grabbed a paperback. The author had a sign displaying a written biography, reading that they have an occupation as a mental health professional in the community.

“Did you write this children’s book?” I asked.

“I did!”

“Awesome, well, my baby is fussy so I won’t stand around and make you listen to that, but I’ll take a copy.”

“Thanks so much!”

They quickly signed the book on the inside cover and handed it to me. I proceeded to try to wander around the store a little longer, but baby still wasn’t drifting off, so I took the book up the register, paid $10, and left. 

As I looked through it later, I noticed the images were blurry, bleeding off the pages, and low quality. I wondered if they were AI-generated. I hadn’t read the book at all in the store, but I saw it was a children’s book being sold by a mental health professional, so I figured one of my kids would enjoy it. But, truly, my kids have tons of books. We go to the library all the time and they all get books as gifts for birthdays, holidays, and random days just because I love books, too. We didn’t need another book.

I honestly bought the book just to support a local author.

The book is self-published, and I won’t out anyone, but yes, after a little investigating, I realized the images were all AI-generated. They are odd, inaccurate, and wonky ones, at that. At first, I didn’t know if they were AI-generated. I don’t know much about the technology itself and haven’t waded much into the controversy surrounding it. I decided to ask an online writers’ group to tell me some signs a book is AI-generated. Well. People Had Things To Say.

23 hours after posting my question, my post had 76 reactions and 415 comments.

415 comments.

Even though my original post said I didn’t want to debate AI and I just wanted to know what some tell-tale signs were for identifying AI-generated work, the comments went up in a firestorm. It was the most commented-on post in the group I’ve seen since joining, by far.

Some comments did what I asked and helped me identify whether or not the book was AI-generated or not, like this comment:

“How many hands are there in the pictures? (laughable but I’ve seen poses that end up with three arms)”

I then looked at the pictures in the book more carefully, and found this:

This is one picture from the book: a little child’s toes sticking out from the bedcovers. One foot has six toes and the other has seven toes. What. in. the. what. There are many pictures like this in the book; animals whose fur changes color from one page to the next, elbows sticking out at impossible angles, and animal paws that sometimes have 3 claws and sometimes have 6.

Other comments suggested that if the images are AI-generated, the writing likely is as well.

There were about 5 comments out of the 415 that said things like:

“Does it matter?”

“Why do you care?”

Ah, the Internet. Such a beautiful place sometimes (eyeroll here). I didn’t have to comment back to these few little spicy comments because many, many, many other people did with responses such as:

“because it steals work.”

“because generative AI is theft.”

And, 400+ other comments. Writers and illustrators and creatives care about this issue. A lot.

The writing in the book is even worse than the wonky pictures. The simple sentences written for children are missing entire words. Many are not complete sentences, have capital letters in the middle, and are missing punctuation. There are words that are repeated twice in a row.

Each page contains one “sentence,” so it shouldn’t have been difficult to eliminate such terrible typos and errors. That is, if a human had written the book.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

I should have vetted the book before buying it, yes I know. That was my mistake. I just grabbed it and said, sure, I’ll buy a copy. I was in a rush and frazzled and just wanted to support someone who seemingly loved what I love. I’m not really bummed about the ten bucks. I blow ten bucks on a couple of coffees most weeks.

I am, however, irritated that someone is profiting off AI images and sentence fragments and calling it a book and saying they created it. I don’t like that this person can sit in a legitimate bookstore in town and sell this junk. I know this is very common online these days, but having it happen in a brick and mortar store by a local person who is a professional in the community was unsettling. This is a big deal for anyone who values original and creative work.

Someday, I will publish a book. It won’t be the best book ever written, but it sure won’t be full of fake or stolen images and half-sentences. If it has my name on the front, I will have at least written it myself. 

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*There are many deep-dive online rabbit holes on why the number 13 is considered unlucky. I began to fall down them, realized that wasn’t really the point of this post, and quit. But, there’s a lot of interesting lore behind the number out there for perusing, if that’s up your alley.

**I refer to the author as “they/their" as to not identify them in any way, including by gender. I’m not interested in exposing anyone.