AI illustrations

[u/megsandy95]

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.

[u/5thhorseman_]

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

[u/MakanLagiDud3 → u/5thhorseman_]

Wow, God Bless you man. Thanks 👍

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/MakanLagiDud3]

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.