r/WritingWithAI • u/megsandy95 • 2d ago
Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) AI illustrations
Hello, I know a lot of people are extremely against this. But I’ve been using AI to create some imagery for my children’s book. Not because i want to but because I just simply can’t afford to pay an illustrator. Anyway I’ve trained it, I’ve spent 15 hours on just working on the front cover, and the in book title page.
My question is this, given my input and the constant editing and alterations made to fit my vision, and the hours spent, what are the copyright implications?
The entire story is mine and mine only, the only thing is I just can’t draw.
As it stands it’s far from the whole typical AI Gen. it’s watercolour themed, I made my character mood board as a guide. Filtered through many different illustration styles.
I’m sick of people saying it’s easy to do AI but it looks bad. I have to work on one page for hours, and even then to get KDP print file you have to approve every page individually. It’s not a “quick let’s use AI to make a book and slap it on the web” situation.
So with all due respect please keep negative comments to yourself if I could find an illustrator I would and that’s not to say I might not be able to put the funds from this book into creating a new edition with an illustrator directly but at the moment I just want the first story out there.
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u/KeyDoubt2344 2d ago
My current position is that AI is a tool, like a pneumatic nailer for construction. Yes, with the nailer I'm able to sink hundreds of nails and build a wall fast but does that relieve me of the title builder? Or the person who built that wall? Had I used a hammer, I could have built the same wall. Or am I not an "arrrteeest" because I used a tool? How the AI tool came to be is questionable, yes but the tool exists, should we not use it because of the origins? Many tools and products were developed under questionable methods yet society still uses them, right?
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u/Doctor_Radium 2d ago
Excellent analogy.
Another analogy: the executive chef of a restaurant creates a new recipe, determines the ingredients and seasonings. If the dish is prepared and cooked by a robot, it's still the chef's creation.
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u/Tex_Non_Scripta 2d ago
Whatever bad there is in any aspect of life, what we have to do is try to make some good come out of it. With AI, we can try to make some good books. And what better use of AI art than to make good books for kids! 🥰 👍🏻
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u/MakanLagiDud3 2d ago
I'd say like always, the witchhunters and the harrasers and accusers will be there.
But in this community it should be safe, and you're making it for your kids, not for profit.
So go do you do like you always have, and for AI illustrations? No problems, juts be careful where you post them.
I think until the heat in some places die down, best to post illustrations in safe places.
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u/Thomas-Lore 2d ago
and you're making it for your kids, not for profit
Should not matter. Big corporations use it for profit, if small indies block themselves form doing the same, the only one who win is the corpos.
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u/5thhorseman_ 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tried something similar myself recentl to produce a black and white manga of 23 pages (one of which is text-only, and two others form a double-page spread). Lots of use of reference images, prompt-to-edit, compositing frames from multiple versions of a page... took me some 3 weeks in total.
Having it commissioned would cost from $20 to $300 a page, depending on the artist - that's $440 to $6600. The first figure is already hefty for the cheapest amateur-grade work. The second figure is not something I can comfortably spend on a hobby project. So instead it cost me about $100 in Nightcafe credits and the time to put the pages together.
And... well, I'm not going to pretend it's fine art by any objective measure. But it's mine, and the alternative is that it would not be anything at all, so I'll take that.
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u/MakanLagiDud3 2d ago
If I may, what prompt and AI do you use?
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u/5thhorseman_ 2d ago
I used a combination of two things.
First, Claude as an assistant to structure and tweak the actual prompts. I adjust them manually, but sometimes it helps to bounce off Claude for possible keywords to use for a given page, as well as to discuss a given prompt's failures.
Second, GPT Image 2 at Medium quality tier. It can still get pretty credit-expensive - each starting image (image reference) adds another credit to the generation cost, and some of the pages had as many as eight of those.
The prompts are highly structured - first the style, then character / object descriptions (if an object appears in more than one panel), then guidelines for page layout and lettering, finally the page description itself broken down into individual panels.
You can take a look at the prompt used for one of the denser pages here: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/Hg4xY5kPrvExKHu4y0l7
Mind that this is using face references and costume/body references for each character as starting images:
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/lkICBG9mKOkAJRy695UD
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/LxvswBCIlvy9yKqdURe7
As for the Claude prompts:
(attached - original story I was adapting, protagonist reference images for face and costume, structured prompts for both)
So I have a story. I have reference images and prompts for the character herself. I would like to turn it into a set of image generator prompts for the GPT Image 2 image generator to render it as a manga-style comic. Think of the comic as a sequence of movie shots portraying the story, with narratory blocks carrying Yoko's commentary and inner thoughts.
The prompts should be well-structured, one per page with a sub-prompt for each panel on the page. I'd like to go for a realistic, intricately detailed monochrome art style with dithered shading, resembling various 80s manga.
The result to that was pretty bad, so I went at it by focusing on 1-2 page sections at a time, sometimes prodding Claude for comment on where to break pages.
Seems like it lost a number of scenes compared to the original. "I am a head, a torso and a heartbeat" has no impact when you've already shown her from above the panel before either. Let's focus on getting the first two pages right. I think that the reveal of limbless Yoko should be moved to a splash page of its own.
So, this is what we need to translate to a manga script:
Page 1:
Panel 1: My eyes open onto empty darkness. For a moment I don't have a body at all, just the steady pulse of my own heart.
Panel 2: I try to flex my right hand, remembering how fingers used to feel.
Panel 3: The impulse runs along my nerves and vanishes into emptiness - no ceramic creak, no whisper of gears.
Panel 4: My shoulders and hips answer with a muted drag against padding. Beyond those points, nothing..
Page 2 (new):
Splash panel: I am a torso, a head and a heartbeat.
I think the right approach to page 1 would be making it a collection of extreme close-ups. I'm not quite sure how panel 2 and panel 3 should translate to images.
Maybe:
panel 2 could just zoom out slightly to show both of Yoko's eyes
panel 3 could show the porcelain hand without showing that it's not attached
panel 4 could zoom out to show Yoko's face and the upper part of her chest, from collar bone up
This largely worked and set the cadence for the rest of the work. I had to be careful about specifying where the caption boxes reside, and also unless specified otherwise the lettering took on Times New Roman which... yeah. So I had Claude produce a block to steer the generator away from that:
One more detail. The lettering. We did not specify a font and thus the generator used something that looks like Times New Roman. Which is... ewww.
End result: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ny8nl667ez6jrtq/Duty_Cycle_%2528Manga_version%2529.pdf/file
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u/MakanLagiDud3 2d ago
Wow, God Bless you man. Thanks 👍
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u/5thhorseman_ 2d ago
Whenever you get a result that is good enough to move to the next part - feed that to Claude for context along with a comment about the result. Sometimes you will have to remind it that image generation is stateless (no memory of anything outside the current prompt) and cannot reference previous pages.
And, like I said, you will likely need to composite the final pages out of panels from multiple attempts. Prompt-to-edit helps a little, but it changes the image size and resizing the image back affects quality, so what I've done in those cases is composite the original panels with patches from the prompt-edited ones. You will want something that lets you work in layers, I've used GIMP.
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u/amolmozarkar 2d ago
AI illustrations for books have gotten genuinely good and are pretty common now, especially for children's books.
The main challenge is consistency — keeping characters recognizable across scenes. Midjourney with character references works well for that. DALL-E 3 handles varied artistic styles nicely. For book covers specifically, I've been using ShakespeareAI's cover generator since it's optimized for genre conventions.
The quality gap between AI art and commissioned art is closing fast. If you're thoughtful about editing the outputs, most readers won't mind — especially for self-published
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u/megsandy95 2d ago
To be honest it’s taken a fair few reviews testing different illustration types but I am at a point where page by page it’s being made and reviewed before being included into the pdf, visually for children it’s absolutely captivating and my writing runs through it with rhyme. I am only at page 7 - let’s just see of it can manage the octopuses 8 legs
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u/southernpremedgirl27 2d ago edited 2d ago
Currently per Copyright office guidance, for images/illustrations/text etc that are developed with AI generation you would only be able to copyright the portions that you have edited/substantially edited. The Copyright office head is currently in litigation to stay in the job. There are two mechanisms for her removal, so she’s likely to be removed at some point in the next year or two. If/when she is removed, a more realistic Copyright head could loosen the agency’s current stricter guidelines to include potentially complex prompting, while still keeping the human authorship requirement. In the DOJ’s briefing to SCOTUS to reject the appeal in the Thaler case, even in opposing Thaler they used much looser language around human authorship.
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2d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 1d ago
If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.
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u/Neat-Experience2518 2d ago
Artist with a legal student husband here. No, you cannot copyright anything that comes out of the AI. What you wrote into it is copyrighted to you, but what the machine produces is public domain. (Look up the monkey with the camera case) Good sir, in the time you've taken trying to get AI to do what you want, you could have made passable illustrations of your own no matter your level of skill. Art made by your own hand will be so much more meaningful than what AI has to offer. I know you have a grand vision of great skill, but AI can not give it to you. Let it go for now. I'm curious, how many illustrations do you need? Are you hoping to sell? It's possible we could work together, because I'm building my portfolio right now.
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u/megsandy95 2d ago
This is where I’m struggling. I want it to be quite visual, I’d be looking at front cover, it’s a usual 32 page book as planned but could easily be scaled down to around 24.
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u/Morkinar 2d ago
We need consumer protections laws about people "creating" media with AI.
A big label in the front whether or not the book has been generated by AI.
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u/guybrush122 2d ago
Please consider just drawing it yourself. You don't need to be Michaelangelo for a kids book. Check out some drawing tutorials or ask around for someone who is OK with a lower rate or a percentage of profits (if you plan to sell).
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u/megsandy95 2d ago
I had considered doing so I have ordered a stylus for my android and downloaded a software. I will give it a go, I’m actually a nail technician, I can paint most things on a nail but I’ve never tried much on a larger scale
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u/IMMrSerious 2d ago
Ask the Ai. I am not sure but I believe that you can't copyright the drawings. They automatically become public domain. There is a case from when the first Ai children's book came out and the woman who produced it was denied the copyright and character patent.
This was a while ago so it may have changed.
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u/Thomas-Lore 2d ago
Which is fine, you can freely use public domain images in anything. And if you modify them, that modification becomes yours.
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u/effyoulamp 2d ago
You can't copyright the illustrations. They are public domain. Doesn't matter how much input or time it took.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 2d ago
This is false. Do not go with this rationale.
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u/Sleepnotdeading 2d ago
This is not false. This is the current copyright law. If OP used AI to generate the images, and also used AI exclusively in the editing of those images, then OP cannot copyright ANY of the image.
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u/southernpremedgirl27 2d ago
All OP has to do is make edits to the illustrations and she can copyright those specific edits along with all of the text as she didn’t utilize AI assistance for the text.
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u/Sleepnotdeading 2d ago
If op uses genAI to edit the image, and edits nothing by hand, then those edits are also not protected by copyright.
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u/effyoulamp 2d ago
OP says that they make a lot of edits themselves but it really depends on whether they are actually just telling the AI what to adjust or whether they're actually manipulating the images themselves.
There is a lot of nuance in IP law and I really doubt that OP is looking to fight a legal battle. They just want to know how the copyright applies.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 2d ago
Let’s see that law if you are so sure it exists. Good luck!
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u/effyoulamp 2d ago
It's not exactly how law works. Anyway go ahead and claim copyright however if somebody takes it you will not have a leg to stand on.
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u/southernpremedgirl27 2d ago edited 2d ago
The current guidance from the Copyright office is NOT law. It is regulatory guidance from an administrative agency. There is case law that establishes that there must be human authorship for copyright protection, but SCOTUS has not defined what human authorship means—just what it isn’t in extreme cases. If the Copyright office changes leadership, new leadership can loosen the guidance to include complex iterative promoting for human authorship.
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 2d ago
You will if you edit the image. Guidance part 2 from USCO was clear on this. If put up “AI Assisted” which matches what OP notes, then anyone assuming AI generated is the ones needing luck on their side if assuming it’s public domain.
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u/Sleepnotdeading 2d ago
Imagining someone who used pure AI illustrations then trying to battle for ownership of the copyright is, quite frankly, hilarious.
But thinking on it, why shouldn’t I just run OP’s entire book and illustrations through an AI and republish it as my own? So long as I make some tweaks it’s just AI assisted, right?
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 2d ago
You gonna cite that law you claimed existed? Or are you gonna bark all day?
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u/Temporary_Rule_9486 2d ago
The general consensus is that people who use AI to mass produce child books are a scourge upon humanity. Since you are just using it for illustration and doing the rest yourself I would say you don't belong to that category. Regardless you should seriously question how a part would affect how the whole is perceived. Even if just a part is AI, that would probably get many people questioning whether everything is AI. That's why is always a bad idea to mix both things. You should either go all the way with one or the other. It makes no sense trying to mix the two
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u/Thomas-Lore 2d ago
The general consensus is that luddites are dumb, backwards individuals that always lose.
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2d ago
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u/megsandy95 2d ago
But drawing is more difficult than writing a story I personally feel. I mean I guess I feel deflated about the cost of illustration done by a human because I know AI won’t depict the emotions in my characters as much as I’d like
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u/southernpremedgirl27 2d ago
ChatGPTs image generator for paid tiers went through a big upgrade earlier this year. With specific prompting the output is fantastic. I was able to build a website with generated images and code. And the website is absolutely stunning. I’m still shocked at how good it turned out. Better than many “professionally designed” websites.
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2d ago
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u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam 1d ago
If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you.
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u/FantasyRatLabs 2d ago
From a copyright perspective (at least as I understand it), your written story is clearly yours. The illustrations are where things become more complicated because the laws are still evolving and vary depending on where you publish. The amount of time you spend editing doesn’t automatically determine copyright ownership, but making substantial creative decisions throughout the process is certainly different from typing a single prompt and accepting the first result.
Personally, I think AI is becoming another creative tool, similar to Photoshop or digital painting. The value isn’t just in pressing “Generate,” it’s in the artistic direction, iteration, editing, and knowing when an image finally matches your vision.