Is This Coloring Book AI-Generated? How to Tell, and Whether It Matters

A note before we start: this post concerns our own methods as well as everyone else's, and we will be plain about that at the end. It would be cheap to write this otherwise.

Obviously AI generated

Search for a coloring book and a good proportion of what you find was generated rather than drawn. Most of the writing about this is either someone selling a course on how to do it, or someone who wants it all burned down.

Neither is much use to a person standing in a shop wondering whether to buy the thing. So: how to tell, what the law actually says, and what you are owed as a buyer.

The visual tells

Generated line art has recognisable failure modes, and once you know them you cannot stop seeing them.

Lines that do not close. The single most reliable tell, and the most practically annoying. A drawn shape closes; a generated one often has gaps where two strokes nearly meet. It looks fine on screen and ruins any attempt at a clean fill.

Uniform line weight. A person varies pressure ~ heavier on the outline, lighter on interior texture. Generated work is frequently one weight throughout, which makes a page that is technically detailed but visually flat, with nothing telling your eye what matters.

Detail that dissolves at the edges. The centre of the image is coherent and the periphery drifts into pattern that means nothing. Hands, feet, hooves, the far side of a fence.

Structure that will not survive scrutiny. Stair treads that do not add up. A chair with an impossible leg. An animal with a joint in the wrong place. Small, and unmissable once seen.

It looks better small. The strongest test. View it as a thumbnail and it is beautiful. Print it at A4 and it falls apart. Drawn work usually goes the other way.

A thousand pages, published on a Tuesday. Catalogue behaviour tells you as much as any page. Nobody draws sixty books a year.

Where copyright actually stands

Briefly, and carefully.

Courts in the United States have held consistently that a work generated with no human author cannot be registered for copyright. That line of cases ~ the Thaler litigation being the best known ~ has held up through appeal, and in early 2026 the Supreme Court declined to revisit it. Machine-alone output is not protected.

That is not the same as saying AI-assisted work cannot be. The Copyright Office has registered several thousand works involving AI where a human's selection, arrangement and modification carried the authorship. The protection attaches to the human contribution, not to the raw output.

What this means in practice for a buyer: a book of unedited generated pages is likely to have thin or no copyright protection, which is precisely why the same images turn up in six different books under six different covers. A book where someone genuinely composed, corrected and finished the work stands on firmer ground.

Rules differ elsewhere. The UK has an unusual provision for computer-generated works; the EU is moving separately. This is a live area and anything written about it has a short shelf life.

Whether it matters

Two arguments, and they do not resolve into one another.

It matters, because you are buying craft. If what you value is that a person looked at a cow and drew it, then a generated cow is not that, whatever it looks like. That is a legitimate preference and nobody should be talked out of it.

It matters less than the result. If a page has clean closed lines, a real tonal hierarchy, and gives you a good hour, it does not become worse because a machine was in the room. A great many people care about the object and not the process, which is also legitimate.

What is not legitimate is being lied to. The offence is not the tool. It is being sold a thing while being allowed to believe it is a different thing.

What you are owed

Not a technical disclosure. Just an honest answer to a direct question.

If a book is listed as hand-drawn, it should be hand-drawn. If a publisher is asked how their pages are made and dodges, that is your answer.

And the practical test stands regardless of process: look at the actual pages at actual size.

Closed lines, varied weight, structure that holds. A badly drawn book is worse than a well-made generated one, and both exist in quantity.

Our own answer

We use AI in generating source artwork, and a human being takes it from there ~ composing, correcting the structure, closing the lines, adjusting weight, and rejecting a great deal that does not survive the test above. The free Friday pages come out of that process.

So do the books.

We say so because we would rather you heard it from us than worked it out, and because we are about to publish a line drawn from public domain film where the provenance question will matter more, not less.

If that changes what you want to buy from us, that is a reasonable thing for it to change. You cannot make an honest decision about something you were not told.

The tool is not the argument. The honesty is.