How we use AI
We use AI to help make these books. We'd rather tell you that plainly than have you wonder, so here is exactly what the AI does, what we do, and why we chose to work this way.
What we do, and what the AI does
Every nüNERD book is shaped by us before any AI touches it. Karen and I read the source, decide what the book is really about, and build its spine: the argument it makes, the scenes that carry it, and a chapter-by-chapter plan for how it moves. We design each illustration style ourselves and write the prompts for the art page by page. Only then do the AI tools come in, several of them, each for a different job: they draft the prose and render the illustrations inside the plan we've drawn. No human draws the finished pages; the AI renders them, and we direct and correct each one, round after round in Photoshop, reworking and re-rendering until the page is what we set out to make.
The prose gets the same hand-work. An AI draft is a starting point, nothing more. We rewrite it heavily, line by line and draft after draft, cutting what is padded, fixing what rings false, and rebuilding sentences until the voice is right. By the time a book is done, a great deal of what you read has been written or rewritten by hand. The book is made in the editing, and that is where the hours go. Every book also goes through the same checks before it ships:
- We check every fact against the original source, line by line. For the Plutarch books, that means the translation itself, references and all.
- We turn AI against itself, too: a separate, independent AI reviewer attacks every draft, hunting for anything weak, padded, or machine-sounding. Nothing that helped write a book is ever allowed to approve it.
- Then Karen and I make every final call. We don't call a book finished until it's one we'd want on our own family's shelf.
What keeps it honest
We didn't want a button that spits out a book, so we built our own toolkit to hold the line. As of September 2026 that's 48 editorial routines and 77 tools we built ourselves, rebuilt three times over as we learned, and still growing. One reads a story across all four levels at once, so the toddler book and the prep book never drift out of agreement. That toolkit, and the two of us running it, are how we keep a standard across a whole library.
Why we chose to work this way
The best thing a child can read is the source itself: Plutarch's own words, the real book, not a version of it. Everything we make is built to get a child there earlier, and to get them there ready, so that when they finally open the original they already know the people, the shape of the story, and the questions it turns on.
There are wonderful old retellings of these lives, and we love them: W.H. Weston, F.J. Gould’s Children’s Plutarch, Kaufman. But they’re single-volume surveys, a chapter or a paragraph per figure, pitched at one older reading level. What doesn’t exist is the rest of it: a single topic taken deep, the whole life with the hard parts kept in and the comparison Plutarch built it around, and then carried across every reading level, from a board book a two-year-old can hear to a prep book that readies a teenager for the original. No publisher is going to pay a team to build that, because the old way of making it costs more than a niche subject can earn back.
AI changes that math. It lets two people build the whole ladder, one topic at a time, and a whole library of them. So the choice a family faces isn't our books versus a hand-written version of the same thing. That version isn't coming. It's our books, the classic surveys we grew up on, or a dry encyclopedia entry. We're using these tools to make the books we couldn't find anywhere else, and to build the library we wish we'd had.
If you’d rather have zero AI, we understand
Some families draw a firm line: nothing their children read should be made with AI. We respect that. If that's your line, we're probably not your imprint.
If your worry is the subtler one, that AI content is usually soulless, dumbed-down filler, then we're on the same side. That kind of book is exactly what our whole process is built to prevent. A book earns its place here by being true, well made, and worth rereading, or it doesn't ship.
Judge for yourself
The surest way to know whether one of these reads like a living book or like filler is to read it, or better, read it aloud and have your child narrate it back. If it’s living, they’ll have something to say. Send us a note with the topic you’re curious about, and we’ll send a sample straight from that manuscript. If it’s hollow, nothing we say here should change your mind. If it isn’t, then how it was made matters a good deal less than what it is.