AI, World Kid Lit Month, and #scbwiSummer25

Happy World Kid Lit Month! Since 2016, September has been a time of highlighting international children’s and young adult literature. It's a terrific month to read a book authored outside your country and share it with a young person—and, if you like, on social media!

An array of reading suggestions can be found at WorldKidLit.org, together with a brand-new reading challenge program for schools, media assets, interviews, and background information.

A hot topic this World Kid Lit Month is AI. Many global reads for children are translations, and concerns are rising that AI may be perceived as an acceptable alternative to human translators. As one such translator, I say nay!

But you don’t have to take my word for it. To explore what translators do for young readers that bots cannot, you can go right to the SCBWI Virtual Summer Conference 2025 session replays. Registration remains open through September 9, affording access to replays of nearly fifty sessions.

One is a twenty-minute interview with Claire Storey, who explores the role of translators as book “scouts,” bringing titles deserving of translation to the attention of the right publishers. Claire describes how in-person networking, including at the London Book Fair and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, has been key to pitching books that she has gone on to translate. One work that she pitched and translated won the 2025 Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize!

Claire Storey holding printed materials she hands out at book fairs

Human translators connecting at the #scbwiSummer25 Translators' Social

Another rich offering is Lawrence Schimel’s breakout session on translation of books for different age groups. Lawrence’s philosophy as a translator is “always to recreate the reading experience," which means making moves AI never could, in order to take readers on a particular emotional journey. (AI, lest we forget, cannot feel.) Translating might include reworking humor that does not land in a new language, reinventing wordplay or rhyme, or even making wholesale changes to poetic structure—all for the sake of fidelity to how the source text moves readers. Lawrence describes taking weeks to complete a board book translation of less than 100 words. Don’t you want to read that book?

Lawrence speaking from Madrid

The opening keynote features Soman Chainani discussing how important it is, in the age of AI, for kidlit makers to share the human side of their creative process. This point reminds me of how author-illustrator Debbie Ridpath Ohi took time at a book signing to make a short video for my students, showing how she had included items of personal significance in the art for I Want to Read All the Books. (Debbie accepts the 2025 Stephen Mooser Member of the Year Award at the #scbwiSummer25 closing session!)

I saved a screenshot from the editorial phase of my latest translation, The Village Beyond the Mist by Sachiko Kashiwaba, to show that many humans also come together to polish the final text of a book.

Portion of The Village Beyond the Mist with changes by two editors, a proofreader, and myself

Collaborative revision is yet another aspect of kidlit that is beyond AI—as is hitting the road with an author to launch a translation. For more on that subject, see my post next Thursday!

Avery Fischer Udagawa’s translations include the 2022 Batchelder Award-winning novel Temple Alley Summer, the 2024 Batchelder Honor book The House of the Lost on the Cape, and new release The Village Beyond the Mist, all authored in Japanese by Sachiko Kashiwaba. Avery works in international education north of Bangkok and volunteers as SCBWI Global Translator Coordinator.

You Can Sign this Statement on AI Training

It's simple.

It's powerful.

It's important.

“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”

You can add your name, and share with others. Here's the link: https://www.aitrainingstatement.org/

I heard about this from Maria Pallante, President and CEO, Association of American Publishers, during her keynote address about copyright and freedom of expression at the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) Publishing University conference on May 16, 2025.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

What's a Fair Split for AI Licensing? (and the option to opt-out)

Generative (or really, regurgitive) AI systems have largely been trained on creative works by human creators, and some part of what these systems have been trained on are works under copyright that have been used without permission or payment. Cue the use of the term 'stolen.'

There's a movement to license works to train AI systems, with the idea that it's better for authors and illustrators and publishers to make some money on the deal, and to have AI training come to the legal side of things.

Two recent developments in this space to be aware of:

In November 2024, it was announced that HarperCollins made a deal to license some of their nonfiction works for AI training, letting authors opt-in or opt-out, and offering a 50%-50% split with the authors, meaning the publisher would keep 50% of the license fee.

One fascinating aspect of the deal was that HC wouldn't say initially which AI platform was licensing the materials. (The Authors Guild did a piece on that offer here. And Emarketer reported later in November that the HC deal was with Microsoft.)

Screenshot of Publishers Weekly article "Agents, Authors Question HarperCollins AI Deal"

And in December 2024, the Authors Guild put out this statement: AI Licensing for Authors: Who Owns the Rights and What's a Fair Split? stating that AI training is not included under "Subsidiary Rights" as in most current contracts, and that:

"a fair split for most deals will give 75–85 percent to the author, depending on the publisher’s role. Note that some academic presses are presently offering authors a mere 25 percent, which unfairly allows the publisher to reap almost all of the benefit while leaving most of the risk to the author. In all cases, the splits must be negotiated between authors (and their agents) and publishers as a new type of use that was not contemplated under existing contracts.

Most importantly, as these licenses are outside of the original publishing agreement, the author’s share of any publisher AI licensing deal should flow directly to the author and not be applied against an advance."

screenshot of the Authors Guild statement: AI Licensing for Authors: Who Owns the Rights and What's a Fair Split?

Certainly, an author or illustrator being able to opt-out is critical.

Also, if you do opt-in, once your work is part of the training of an AI system, it doesn't seem like there's a workable mechanism to get it back again and remove that information from the knowledge-base the AI has developed.

The metaphor in my mind is that you can't use eggs to bake a quiche and then once it's baked remove the eggs. The eggs are in there. Which leads me to question the timeframe of deals like HC's with Microsoft - they're saying it's just for three years. 

These are early days for AI, and I hope keeping up on these developments is helpful for you as well.

Because none of us know when our publishers might let us know there's been an offer to license our works for AI training, and these are things we should consider.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

NaNoWriMo and AI

Nonprofits are often reliant on sponsors to help fund things that are part of the nonprofit's mission. Sometimes, the sponsor wants the nonprofit's audience, but there's a real or perceived disconnect in what the sponsor actually does and the health/welfare of the nonprofit's audience.

Such is the case with the current heat regarding National Novel Writing Month's position on AI and having AI sponsorship. 

Matthew Dow Smith posted on Bluesky:

I understand why an "AI" "writing" app would want to sponsor a writing event, but for the life of me, I can not understand why any event based around actual writing would accept the sponsorship of an "AI" company.

screenshot of NaNoWriMo's position on AI, taken Sep 2, 2024

On Sep 2, 2024 NaNoWriMo edited their "Position on AI" to include this:

we have edited this post by adding this paragraph to reflect our acknowledgment that there are bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically. We want to make clear that, though we find the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic for the reasons stated below, we are troubled by situational abuse of AI, and that certain situational abuses clearly conflict with our values. We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse. 

We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege. 

At issue is the unlicensed scraping/stealing of the copyrighted work of writers (and other creatives) that the large AI programs have done to enable them to "generate" text -- though, as I've written before, I think that's a misnomer, and we should use "regurgitate" to better describe what they're actually doing.

Here's an April 2023 example of how NaNoWriMo is suggesting folks might use AI to help with their writing (see point 3).

Another post on Bluesky, by Becky & Frank:

The NaNoWriMo AI statement stings. I’ve been working as a writer for over a decade and have never completed that challenge. Writing is hard work and what I have to fight daily to do my job often feels insurmountable. Stealing the hard fought words of others to complete your stories is sick and sad.

One of the challenges of social media is that often it's a place of heat and not light. But one of the cool things is that it lets you know when something's happening, and you get to figure out how you feel about it.

Final thought on this to share from Bluesky is from Sarah Guillory:

I’m a runner. I love what it does for my mind, body, & soul. So people who fake running (who hire people to run logged into their Strava account) baffle me. What is the purpose? The same is true for using AI. Why pretend you are a writer when you are not writing? The creative process is the point.

What's your take? Is there a % of AI assistance that's feels right for you?

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

AI and the fourth party cheated... The creative experience you didn't have

I don't intent this to be a screed against technology, but in all the talk about artificial intelligence and these newer re-generative large language models, much of the focus has gone to:

First party damage: 

This is the impact on creatives (that's us) when these AI models are trained on our work without compensation. 

Second party damage:

There's also been discussion about the need for transparency with consumers, so, for instance, they're not "fooled" by a digital audiobook narration when they thought they were getting a human performance.

Third party damage:

Translators and illustrators and writers not getting the gig because the publishers are just using AI programs to re-generate "good enough" work instead.

There's a fourth to consider.

Today in my online journey I was presented with an ad for an AI company's product that "can write up to 20 books per month" with the tagline: "Your book idea, finally written."

It took me twenty years from the time I started seriously writing KidLit and wanting to be published to having my first YA novel traditionally published this month. I wasn't working on that novel for the entire time, but I've put in a LOT of hard work on my craft, over many years. 

Having an idea is not the creative work. It's crafting a story to deliver that idea, and that's how we develop the unique voice we each learn to use when creating our art. (When editors talk about looking for "voice" this is what they mean. How is your version of idea A different from everyone else's version of idea A?) 

And it feels like this company is encouraging folks to cheat the process -- to not do the hard work, to not learn how to write over many many drafts, and just have a computer model do it for them. So easy! Write twenty books a month! I can't even begin to imagine how terrible those twenty books would be. And in a marketplace that's already so crowded, it just makes it that much harder for consumers to find the good stuff -- the stuff we've been working so hard to craft so well.

I shared my admittedly salty take on the ad with some friends, and one of them brought up how amazing the creative process is -- how yes, it can be hard, but it's also incredibly rewarding: to conceptualize something and then put in the creative time to craft it into the piece of art you want it to be. And that someone looking to have a computer model do the writing for them was cheating themselves out of a creative life.

And I think that's right. And we should maybe consider that Fourth party damage. 

I'm very grateful I get to live a creative life, and create books for kids and teens. I hope you get to enjoy that creative life, too. It's pretty wonderful.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

AI re-gurgitation can be a call for YOUR unique creativity

So there's a lot of talk about "generative" AI. I think that's a misnomer. It's re-generative. It's not generating anything new. It might be even more appropriate to call it "regurgitative" AI, as it's digesting stuff and then bringing it back up in an altered form...

The Summer-Fall 2022 issue of The Authors Guild Bulletin included an article by Mary Rasenberger (the CEO of the Authors Guild) called "Artificial Intelligence: How Will Authorship Be Defined In An AI Future?"

These words, from the final paragraph, have been resonating with me since I first read it, and it seems worthwhile considering them as we head into 2024:

"Do we want humans or AI creating our literature and other arts? ... AI cannot feel, think, or empathize. It lacks the essential human faculties that move the arts forward. While it is remarkable that engineers could create a "new" Rembrandt that so closely resembles an authentic one, we do not need new Rembrandts; we need new art and literature to reflect where we humans are now, and where we might be going."

—Mary Rasenberger

I find in those words enormous inspiration, a call to creativity. Let's tap into the very things that make us remarkably human as we create works for kids and teens. Let's not regurgitate "new" classics, let's create new books that become classics—because of how human they are, how much they speak to kids and teens now, and how profoundly they give voice to each of us creators.

The advice has often been put in another way:

Tell the story in the way only YOU can tell it.

That's our voice - as writers, as illustrators*, we need to find our voice, and then tell stories in the way only WE can tell them.

And with that inspiration for your creative work ahead,

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On!
Lee

*Not to leave translators out. There's enormous creativity in translating, and two translators will create two different translations from the same text. But it seems that part of the art of translation is the effort to bring the original creator's voice to a new language while keeping not just the story but also the feel, the tone, and maybe we can use the word here, too: the voice of the original. Translation is fascinating, and if there's a translator reading this who wants to be a guest blogger about the art and craft of translating books for kids and teens, just reach out: leewind (at) roadrunner (dot) com

The Authors Guild Shares "Practical Tips for Authors To Protect Their Works from AI Use"

Our friends at the Authors Guild are doing some important education and advocacy around Artificial Intelligence, in particular the unauthorized use of copyright-protected content to train generative AI -- though I do think we should be calling it "re-generative" because these systems are not creating anything new, they're regurgitating and remixing human-created creative work.

This piece, Practical Tips for Authors To Protect Their Works from AI Use, is very instructive.

In it, the Authors Guild suggests a "No AI Training" notice be used, something like:

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

It's well-worth checking out.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee

Maureen Johnson Shares a "Rough and Ready Alarm" About AI and Publishing...

Check out this Maureen Johnson Instagram post from Thursday Jul 13, 2023. In it, she shares that a well-known author working with a big publisher reached out to tell her that their contract currently in negotiation is hung up over AI. 

As Maureen tells us that author said:

"because they're trying to put AI in my contract that says my work can be taken and fed to a program... to basically spit out more of this person's stuff -- without that person being involved."

Then, Maureen says,

"Authors, it's here. We knew it was coming, but it's actually here. And this is the moment."

Maureen connects this to the SAG Actors Union strike, as one of the issues they're fighting is the use of their "forever image" even though they're just getting paid for just one day's work... As SAG Actor Billy Minshall put it on his Instagram, 

"...If I accept a job as a background performer for a single day, the powers that be want to pay me for that one day (less than $200), scan my face and use my likeness in perpetuity without additional compensation. Come on now. You can do better than that."

As Maureen says, we authors need to talk - to our agents, to our editors, and to each other. We need to know what it means if AI is in our contracts, and what it means if it's not in our contracts.

And what's really telling is that an author with a lot of clout, and their agent, can push back -- but what about creators who aren't in that position? Like the actors, and writers of Hollywood, we need to come to solutions about this together. 

Illustrate and Translate and Write On,
Lee

Opportunity to Sign the Authors Guild Open Letter to Generative AI Leaders

Our friends at the Authors Guild have sent an open letter to the leaders of the major Generative AI developers, saying:

"You’re spending billions of dollars to develop AI technology. It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited."

The letter has three requests of these companies, that they should:

1. Obtain permission for use of our copyrighted material in your generative AI programs.

2. Compensate writers fairly for the past and ongoing use of our works in your generative AI programs.

3. Compensate writers fairly for the use of our works in AI output, whether or not the outputs are infringing under current law.

You can read the full letter and, if you choose, add your name as a signatory here.

Illustrate, Translate, and Write On,
Lee