Dinosaur in a tutu? Anne Rooney

Spinosaurus by Adobe stock, 2025

I've been wondering again if I will have to give up this job of writing children's books and do something entirely different (and AI-proof). Having just got used to the idea that my job now consists of writing in a way as unlike AI as possible so that I can't be easily replaced by publishers cutting corners, I've stumbled into the next challenge. And I'm not sure there's a way around this one. 

Spinosaurus by Nobu Tamura, 2024

 

  See that dinosaur above? It's supposed to be a Spinosaurus. Spinosaurus, as any 6-year-old can tell you, had a sail along its back. Along, not across, like a skirt.  This is what a Spinosaurus looks like (see right). Adobe have the audacity to label their rendering 'Realistic portrayal of a Spinosaurus'. Not realistic, not even biologically possible.

A significant part of my work involves finding reference images from which an illustrator can work to produce the art we need in the book. The reference images are important, as otherwise the illustrator or picture researcher (who might not know much about the subject) is likely to go online and find pictures that are out of date, wrong, or — a new threat — ridiculous AI slop. So my job is to provide them with pictures that are NOT like the 'realistic' Spinosaurus Adobe will dish up. Adobe, once upon a time, would have been considered a reasonably reliable source. 

Nothing like a Stegosaurus

Here's another. I needed a picture of a Stegosaurus skeleton. This, or something like it, is offered all over the place. I hope I don't have to tell you it is nothing like a Stegosaurus skeleton. Stegosaurus is the one with plates all along its back, a herbvivore with a small head, and no fierce, meat-eating teeth. There's a proper Stegosaurus skeleton for comparison below this travesty.

Fortunately, I know what a Stegosaurus looks like, so I can tell this is rubbish. But there are now more ridiculously wrong images than there are correct images, so it's taking me much longer to find good reference images. 

Actual Stegosaurus skeleton

And I don't only write about dinosaurs. I've been preparing the first bits of a book on machinery, and although I know broadly what the workings of the machines look like, I don't know in sufficient detail to be able to spot errors in an AI rendering of the inside of an engine. I've found a few that I know are wrong. But there are others that could certainly slip through. Now, I recognise some of the sites or picture agencies that are mostly or entirely using AI and I don't go near them. But it's cutting down the options and slowing down the process. The AI generated slop is proliferating so quickly that I have to scroll through screens of it looking for something that might be correct. 

For textual material, I can go back to books. But some of the things I need images for aren't in any books that I know of. Even if they are it's much slower to find an image in a book and scan/photograph it and record its provenance than to grab an image from a web page and its URL. The time consideration aside, though, if I can't provide reference images, the books won't happen. Some books will still happen, but a lot won't be possible. And how long will it be before people en masse begin to think that Spinosaurus had a skirt or Stegosaurus looked like the demon child of Edmontosaurus and T rex?

Anne Rooney

Out now (Jan 2025) from Arcturus, illustrated by Ro Ledesma: Weird and Wonderful Dinosaur Facts
 

 

 

Robots here we come! Writing for 7-9 year-old girls and boys - by Rosalie (or Sam) Warren

All signed up and ready to go!

I must say, I'm excited about my new series, recently signed up with Phoenix Yard Books, who published my Coping with Chloe last year. The series is aimed at 7-9s and it's all about robots - well, one robot in particular, who comes from Sydney, Australia and has somehow ended up in the home of Noel, a ten-year-old Coventry boy who was expecting a state-of-the-art wheelchair and instead took delivery of a robot.

The idea is to have an exciting story interspersed with plenty of robot facts - of the kind that will, I hope, appeal to the age group in question and, with luck, will pull in some reluctant boy readers. It's for this reason that I have acquired yet another name - the author of the books will be Sam Warren - the younger, geekier brother, perhaps, of Rosalie!

I'm thrilled about the series, but what's making me most excited at the moment is rediscovering AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics - subjects that have lain dormant in my brain for several years. Way back... too many years to count... I did an MSc at Edinburgh University in Artificial Intelligence and fell in love with the subject, which surprised me by focusing more on the way humans do things like learning, understanding, language processing, vision, etc, than on the machines. Or maybe that was the aspect I paid most attention to. I soon became sidelined into linguistic semantics and ended up doing a PhD on the subject of 'then'. Honestly. I knew more about 'then', for a while, than most other people on earth. I can see you're impressed (or possibly not...). I do still feel a little glow, however, every time I use the word.

But 'then' is a long way from AI and robotics, and even when I took up a lectureship at Birmingham University in the School of Computer Science, most of what I did involved linguistics (by that time I'd moved on to metaphor) and teaching various programming languages, some of which still haunt me in my dreams. (I did learn to match up the brackets, though. Helps enormously with proofreading...)

So doing the research for WIXI Robot has involved me in an exciting few weeks of catching up - reading everything I can about all that's happened in the 'field' since I slid through the gap in the fence. I'm particularly interested in the progress that robots have made in learning to speak with humans - some, but, as the guy on telly used to say, not a lot. Language understanding is, for a myriad fascinating reasons, one of the hardest tasks in AI.

I've also been thinking about some of the ethical questions concerning the possible intelligent robots of the future and this ties in, too, with the sci fi novel for adults I've just finished writing.

It's an odd feeling, when disparate parts of your life suddenly come together. Not unpleasant, necessarily, but somewhat scary. Like introducing your boyfriend to your parents for the first time. The bit of me that did AI has never met the bit of me that writes novels before. Hey Sheila, meet Rosalie. And Sam...

Did you know that Leonardo da Vinci designed robots - a robotic knight and a lion? Or that some robots run on human excrement? Or that tiny robots called nanobots can enter the bloodstream and attack cancer cells? Or... no that's enough for today. But if you have 7-9 year-old children or grandchildren (etc), or if you teach that age-group, I'd love to know what you/they think of the robot series idea. We haven't finalised all the details yet, so your ideas are welcome. And I'll tell you more about WIXI Robot soon.

Best wishes,
Ros/Sam

Rosalie Reviews (blog)
Rosalie Warren website