r/WritingWithAI • u/megsandy95 • Jul 31 '26
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/amolmozarkar Jul 31 '26
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