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I find the focus on children’s books to be a little sick. Educating the next generation is not an area to content farm for profit with minimal effort.

I’m honestly curious. What do you see in this worth promoting? Generating low effort (“in 2 hours”) content with ML is not news.

I want to +1 the earlier comment about it being a tool. I understand your sentiment, and agree with the idea of farming out content to be cause for concern. But I want to offer a glimmer of hope with a different take.

I've thought about writing a children's book. I have a few ideas I want to share after watching my younger relatives gifting mediocre "glitter princess goes to the ballet" type books which truly offer no educational value, and are cliche children junk.

I can't illustrate, so an AI art tool could help me generate graphics easier - even if just to establish a "vibe" to share with professional illustrators.

A more uniquely enabled by technology idea: They also offer the opportunity to tailor micro-niche books. If you wanted to make a book, say on entrepreneurship (this is HN after all, so it's just an example), it'd be cool to make 50 versions... maybe one for black boys, and asian little girls, and every combination of inclusive under the sun. I know "inclusivity" has become a culture-war topic, but minority kids do seem to respond well to it, and being able to make a version for everyone is an exciting idea. It'd be hard to do that for a traditional artist, but much more affordable for an AI model. Every book could be AI-modified to be tailored to the actual child reading it! You could buy a book for your kid, where the parents look like their parents, and the child has the right number of siblings, in the right country/city, with the right nationality, eating that kid's favorite food, etc.... all while supporting a single narritive/moral.

Who is harmed by producing a book for kids?

Not everything needs to be educational, maybe a story about a bunny going to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread is good enough to keep the kids off the Facebook for a couple minutes.

To some degree, the OP here is more or less just a rewording of, and invocation of, the 'think of the children' argument. And because of this, personally, I don't really buy it — at least: not the additional emotional weight/baggage that such an argument tries to buy.

A lot of children's books can be viewed as, or compared with, toys. They're fun, whilst also being educational in some way. With the main difference being the focus on words/language (plus images). Plus story, I guess.

But that specific focus aside: a lot of folk still think it's perfectly fine to give their kids toys that are basically plastic tat that is mass produced in China (almost an equivalent to a content farm, perhaps?), as opposed to beautifully hand-crafted toys. Because, well: that's fine, really.

Similarly, if a parent or relative makes some toy for a child themselves, it's ok for some of those to still be minimal- or low- effort, particularly if the end result is still good-enough (or better), and, more importantly, still treasured by the child — even if only for a short period (e.g. a paper plane / boat / crane).

These are tools. They'll let people create things that they otherwise could not create.

Like other creation methods: some of that will be worthless crap, some of it will be mediocre, very little of it will be great.

I'm looking forward to the great parts.

Agreed, but this post seems to indicate that the author created neither the text nor the associated images. Supplementing one or the other seems like a perfectly acceptable use case, but if a self acclaimed "author" is neither capable of story or visuals then I would argue they have no business being an author in the first place.
Sure, this particular output seems uninteresting. I'd have to imagine that this is more of a tutorial or showcase than an attempt to create art.
What I see problematic with this approach is that consumers attention is also a finite resource. Having tons of worthless crap will significantly decrease the chances of finding any great parts.
I feel like this is question reflects the early days of Google, It would be like telling the youth to go to the library instead of using the internet.
childrens books are unique in that the content is simple and easily generated by AI. highschool educational books would be much harder to do as it requires more research and checking for accuracy.

any technology that saves people hours of labor is worth promoting especially if its recent.

I assure you, the existing supply of children's books is not a gold standard of education.
Not heard of Midjournal, and too lazy to watch, is that an open source version if Midjourney?