Against AI Slop

 At this point it seems inevitable that I am destined to become a collector of classic children's books. There is something about very appealing to me. Had I enough time and money, I'd probably start a business as a collector and trader.

Part of the reason is certainly my shock at discover the underwhelming quality of the children's books I've run across lately while inspecting the changes in free library kiosk in the park (which I do at least once a day lately), and in bookstores like Dog Eared Pages. It was also my disappointing at not finding books I expected to find. I am so naive.

There is probably nothing wrong with children's books lately that isn't wrong with other published material in our society. But it is made much worse because lately visual design and illustrations are simply terrible. We live in an era far degraded from the past in all our designs.

AI is making it worse. When the AI revolution hit two years in the spring of 2023, children's books were hit immediately. My Youtube feed was filled with videos describing how to make money letting AI generate books that one could sell on Amazon. Children's books was hardest hits, because the stories are short. AI-generated illustrations and AI-generated text were supposed to make people money. It was disgusting to see this. People actually thought it was a good idea.

The word people are using lately is "AI slop." This terms refers to anything generated by AI, whether text or images, that has a noticeable inferior quality as marking it as AI-generated. AI slop is every. It has even invaded academic papers submitted to journals. I've mentioned the growing awareness that frequent use of em-dashes are a tip-off that it was AI. I saw an X post recently in which the author searched a database of recently published papers for the phrase "Certainly, ...". If you've ChatGPT, you know that's another tipoff that it was AI. 

I know that as a child I would have sniffed out AI slop and hated it. I would have hated a lot of kids literature that is not AI-generated, but nothing about AI kids books would have seemed real to me.

So if I become a collector of children's literature, I am going to focus on classic picture books from the 1970s and before. I don't necessarily need to find first editions and such things. I don't need to be that kind of collector at least for now. 

Everything fun for me is a game with rules I make up for myself.  In this case, I'm adopting the rules, at least for now, that I want to find books in person. That means going to used book shops, which I already do, but now I have an even better reason, and a whole new section of the store to investigate. Of course there are private sales too. I want to avoid just buying things off the web, even if its from a reputable used book site, but never off Amazon. They've already done too much to destroy used book shop.

Acquisitions will be slow. The first one I already know, and I have located a version locally in Phoenix which I can purchase. It's at a book shop I didn't know existed. It will require a field trip. How fun is that?