Sssshhhh don’t mention AI - is it used in The Good Knight Series?

By Chris Livemore

As someone who was born in the early 1980s I never imagined that I would have to adapt so quickly to a technology, or even be replaced by one. A vast majority of my working career involved writing and winning funding bids for sustainability projects. And then I stopped winning as many bids, I couldn't work out why, I questioned my ability, my skills, my knowledge, my sanity and then my ability again.

And then it clicked. I attended a meeting and was informed by an attendee Claude had been helping her. And someone else mentioned Claude as well. I just assumed it was a very busy consultant from France. How wrong I was.

People were using AI, bids that were taking me weeks and weeks to write were taking AI programmes 15 minutes. It was remarkable, with the right prompts and the right uploads you could let machines do the work for you. A major funding stream for my business gone, almost overnight. It was depressing. And there is so much AI out there, which is developing almost by the minute. It is as terrifying as Vlad the Impaler was. Maybe.

But what could it mean for children's picture books and am I using it for The Good Knight Books?

What it can and can't do (yet)

I've dabbled in AI through my consultancy work, the basics like ChatGPT, Grok. Claude, Photoshop and Microsoft's CoPilot. I don't like it, which is probably due to not fully understanding it, but to be competitive it has to be a part of my business and I am trying to learn how to use it. It seems that the landscape we are now in means that businesses who don't integrate AI into their business models will lose out to businesses that do.

This isn't exactly the case for writing a children's picture book (yet), try it. Ask ChatGPT or Claude to put together a 12 spread children's picture book, tell it about the characters, the narrative, the page turners and other aspects that make up a children's story.

Then read it.

My work here is done.

While you will have 12 spreads, the wording will lack the human element, the humour, the warmth - it will contain jokes that my 2 1/2 year old tells me like 'knock knock', 'who's there?', 'carrot', 'carrot who?', 'it's a carrot'. Simply not funny.

It will contain rhymes that don't rhyme, or use the same word to rhyme for example:

"The pirate bunnies favourite food is a carrot,

On his shoulder sat a colourful, sqwarking carrot."

Rubbish.

I don't think I need to go any deeper than that - you can't write a good children's picture book with AI, maybe it can help you edit, generate ideas but for now humans are front and centre of creating the magic that comes with a new picture book.

If I generated Jack the Knight books using AI and put it next to one that I created entirely through my own brain then you'd see the difference immediately. For now, AI cannot compete with the human imagination and I hope that it never will. The technology is evolving so rapidly that it could make that last statement redundant in months.

Now on to the pictures…I can draw a little, I enjoy it but I’ve never been taught how to or gone beyond a basic Photoshop course. So AI image generation appealed to me.

I will start by saying it is genuinely impressive at producing a single image, Nano Banana and some of the tools released by Adobe are genuinely impressive. Ask it for a medieval knight in a castle courtyard in a watercolour style and it will produce something in thirty seconds that would have required considerable skill and time to create by hand.

It can generate some truly stunning imagery and video content - I completely lack the ability to create the latter at the moment.

The problem, for a picture book, is consistency.

A picture book requires the same character, the same face, the same build, the same expression, the same specific details that make a child recognise them across every single page, rendered differently in every scene. Different angles, different lighting, different interactions with different characters and environments, all while remaining unmistakably, completely the same person.

AI still struggles to do this reliably across an entire picture book. Every image generation produces something slightly different, every prompt changes something small (or adds an extra leg, nose or set of glasses!). Jack on page one and Jack on page twelve would have different eyes, different proportions, different hair. Not dramatically, but enough. Enough that a child notices. Enough that the emotional connection children build with illustrated characters, which depends entirely on consistency and familiarity, simply doesn't form.

This is likely to change very quickly and if you read this in 6-months, then this statement is probably wrong and complex picture books are being developed by AI and you might not be able to notice. I have used Photoshop's AI software to put the images together on www.thegoodknightbook.com but it can't be part of the picture books.

This is why I am currently improving my own illustration skills rather than using generated images for the books, it doesn't work - although everytime I say that, I should actually say "it doesn't work at the moment." It clearly will and it is going to have a big impact on children's picture books over the next few years.

The thing AI will never replicate (possibly)

There is a deeper issue beyond the technical limitations. The best children's picture books have a warmth that exists in the relationship between the words and the pictures, the way an illustrator finds something in a line of text that the author didn't consciously put there, and draws it. The way Axel Scheffler found something in Julia Donaldson's words that made the Gruffalo feel simultaneously terrifying and completely safe. The way Quentin Blake's illustrations somehow contained more feeling than any photorealistic image could in every book he contributed to. I love how Sarah Warburton’s illustrations bring some of Lu Fraser’s wonderful picture books to life.

That relationship is human. It emerges from two people, or one person working across both disciplines, caring deeply about specific characters and finding ways to make readers care about them too. AI tools can automate storyboards, suggest colour schemes, and generate artistic alternatives, streamlining the creative process without undermining the distinctive human touch when used by skilled artists who maintain their creative vision.

The key phrase there is "used by skilled artists who maintain their creative vision." AI as a tool in the hands of a human artist is a different proposition from AI as a replacement for one.

The former is a brush. The latter is a shortcut that produces something that looks like the destination without taking the journey that makes the destination meaningful.

Maybe that is the best way of describing AI currently, it is a shortcut that doesn't produce the same quality and consistency of a human brain for creative content and children’s picture books drop right in the middle of that content.

Children know the difference. Not intellectually, they don't analyse illustration technique or writing styles at three years old. But they respond to warmth and they respond to character and they respond to the feeling that something was made specifically to delight them by someone who genuinely cared about getting it right and bringing a story to life.

Right now, AI doesn't care and cannot generate feelings. Until it does then humans will always come out on top with a children's picture book, once it does then let’s keep all our fingers and toes crossed we don’t see scenes from The Terminator or The Matrix become reality.

Where this leaves The Good Knight

AI won’t be used to create The Good Knight books, I don’t see the need. I love the process of creating something, I love developing ideas for quests, adventures and trying to make children and adults laugh. Where’s the fun in writing prompts for some AI software to take all of that away from you? I don’t have anything negative to say about people who do choose this approach but I just to know that all of the ideas and concepts in each book came from my imagination (well actually Fire Pud the Dragon was entirely my sons idea so I better give him some kudus there).

The AI-generated images on this website are what they are, useful explorations of character, helpful for visualising the world of the books, interesting starting points. It helps me get some images online, especially for the blogs. I can write blogs fast, I’ve always written and researched, but getting images made as fast just wouldn’t be possible.

They are not the books. They wont ever be in the books.

I want to build my skills to create this myself or work with an illustrator to get that human connection. So all of The Good Knight books will be illustrated by a human being who reads them, lives with the characters for months, and finds something in Jack and Fire Pud and Princess Charlotte and Sir Percy that neither AI nor I could have found alone.

That collaboration, between writer and illustrator, between words and pictures, between intention and interpretation is the thing that makes a great picture book. It has always been the thing. And it will remain the thing long after the technology has improved in ways neither of us can currently predict.

AI will change the picture book market. It is already changing it. But I don’t think it can replace the human element. The warmth. The humour. The magic. The way an author and illustrator can create a new world - and that’s the beauty of the creative sector, you need actual people to create.

Some things have to be made by hand. ⚔️

Join Jack's Shield Wall at thegoodknightbook.com/shield-wall. New members this month receive a free Guide to Medieval Insults. Every word of which was written by a human being who found medieval vocabulary genuinely funny, which is exactly the kind of thing AI would struggle to explain. 🏰⚔️