“Directive Detectives: The Freedom Trail Directive” opens with an 11-year-old girl climbing the steps of the Boston Public Library, past “the stone lions guarding the entrance.”
In reality, no lions stand at that entrance. Two bronze figures by Bela Pratt, Science and Art, sit on the steps at Copley Square; the library’s lions are inside, on the grand staircase. The illustration on the cover and inside page shows the lions anyway.
Mary Coffey, a professor of art history at Dartmouth College, said she was not especially troubled by a drawing getting a building wrong. Pictures do that constantly, including the ones she teaches. “Paintings are total confabulations,” she said. What interests her is “who’s doing the confabulating” — whether there is someone behind the image who made choices and can answer for them.
In this case there isn’t, exactly. The book’s author, Giulio Savo of Claremont, said the illustrations were generated by artificial intelligence.
“I am using AI for my illustrations,” he said. “These are my stories, these are my words, but I’m not an illustrator.”
On Monday night, Claremont Middle School gave a copy to every family who came to its first author event, paid for with federal money set aside for family engagement.
‘A dream come true’
Savo, 50, stood at the front of a room filling with parents, grandparents and children, with pizza on the way and cookies from the culinary students next door.
“I have to say this is the first real event I’ve done like this, and it’s a dream come true,” he told them.
He is the son of Italian immigrants; his mother came to the United States in 1954 as a refugee whose home in Italy had been occupied by German soldiers. He studied history and English at Boston College, finished law school without practicing, and spent 21 years in digital marketing. His two children went through Claremont Middle School and Stevens High School.
“History has always been a part of my journey,” he said. “I’ve always wondered why people do things.”
He published his first book in July 2025, for his late brother. “Directive Detectives” is his third, and the first he has written for middle schoolers. Four friends from Boston Latin School find a hidden room in the public library and a cabinet of “directive files” that send them along the Freedom Trail, with Paul Revere connecting the stops.
Savo walked the audience through the gold dome of the State House, the Tea Party meetings at Old South Meeting House, and the lanterns at Old North Church. He told them history “works very quietly until it’s done,” and that he likes saying, “I don’t know,” because “it means we get to learn something new.”
Much of what he said to the children was about not waiting.
“Most of the time, I didn’t publish anything or put anything out there because I was afraid,” he said. “I was worried that I wouldn’t be good at this. I’m still not sure if I am, but I might not be horrible.”
“If you’re 11, 12, 50 or 60, there’s always time to do something new, to believe in yourself.”
‘I couldn’t afford an illustrator’
Afterward, over pizza, Savo spoke to the Valley News freely about using AI.
“The reality is, I’m a working-class person, and I couldn’t afford an illustrator,” he said. “I’m not taking anyone’s job away from them.”
The technology, he said, took his own job.
“I lost my job because of AI with digital marketing,” he said. “It’s not like AI can do it better, but it can do a heck of a lot cheaper.” He spent four months out of work, writing, and has a new job now.
AI has been “an integrated tool in my toolbox” for two decades in marketing, he said. He said he used it here partly because middle school readers tell him they like having pictures, and partly because he runs his own social media. Many of the images, he said, began with photographs his family has taken in Boston over 20 years.
“I would never hire an illustrator in the first place,” he said.
He said he wrote every word of the text himself and that he has been inside the Boston Public Library. But some of the same mistakes from the illustrations also make their way into the text.
The book says the library “had opened more than a hundred years earlier, in 1895,” which is the year the Copley Square building opened; the library itself dates to 1848 and opened its first reading room in 1854. Reading the book aloud on Monday, Savo called Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” a poem “written in 1865.” It was written in 1860.
The book is self-published through Amazon, whose content guidelines require authors to tell the company when a book contains AI-generated images. Amazon keeps that disclosure to itself. It does not appear on the listing, and nothing in the book says how the pictures were made.
He said he had expected to be asked about AI.
“Anything different is scary,” he said. “Illustrators are probably really scared that this is really interfering with their craft, and it absolutely is.” Then: “Art used to be cave drawings, so everything evolves.”
‘Where are the lions?’
Coffey’s objection is not that an image is unreliable. The images she teaches are unreliable in interesting ways — a mural can be argued with, its maker’s choices traced and questioned. That is most of what her job is.
A generated image offers nothing to argue with.
“It’s just a predictive language model,” she said. “It doesn’t have any thoughts. It doesn’t have any critical capacities. It’s not looking for information, weighing the various informational inputs it finds.” With a person, she said, “there is a kind of subjectivity and an intentionality that can be interrogated, that can be held accountable.”
A fantasy novel can look however it likes, she said. A book that walks children past real landmarks is a different proposition.
“If they’re illustrating a sort of historical event, and they’re introducing historical landmarks that are part of the curriculum, then there should be some reasonable accuracy there,” she said.
She pictured a reader taking the book at its word.
“A kid that gets fired up about the Boston Library by this book goes to the library,” she said. “They’re going to be looking for the lion. Where are the lions? And then the parent’s going to have to, like, well, that’s actually New York.”
Turning pages, she stopped on the four detectives, drawn from behind in the same order with the same backpacks in scene after scene.
“It’s as if they’ve just been chopped out of every scene and just plopped back into every scene,” she said.
Illustration, as she described it, is “a parallel story” running alongside the words — “the images enhance the text, the text informs the images.” Measured that way, she said, “these images are so unnecessary.”
To her, the choice says something about the author. “It just reflects a person who doesn’t have a sophisticated understanding of writing for children,” she said.
Writers who work with illustrators, she said, treat the pictures as part of the craft rather than a service to buy: “The whole thing is the craft. It’s not just your part.”
Looking at the drawings, Coffey said she could see “aesthetic threads” of children’s book illustrators she loved, pulled in and flattened out.
“Uncredited, and then this is what I hate about AI: genericized and kind of boiled down to these perfectly adept illustrations, but it’s just such an impoverished visual language.”
What she finds harder to shake is what using AI leads to.
“You can see it pointing towards a future where like 90 percent of the books will have this sort of style of illustration,” she said. “I worry about what it will mean for a generation of children to grow up in a world where AI is stalking their imagination.”
She would prefer that anyone using AI “be very forthcoming about how they’re using it.” Schools and publishers, she said, are mostly improvising: “Most institutions do not have policies. They don’t know how to put them together.”
Claremont’s own policy manual lists a policy on the use of generative artificial intelligence, filed among the district’s technology and data rules. Its text was not posted online, and the district did not provide a copy before deadline.
Coffey is a claimant in the authors’ class action against the AI company Anthropic over books used to train its models, and expects a few thousand dollars before her publisher’s share and taxes.
“I don’t even care about the payout,” she said. “I want my work back, but I can never get it back.”
‘A light switch that turns on and produces a book’
Vermont writer Dustin Warburton has written about 20 books in 20 years, including “Dennis the Wild Bull,” a 2013 children’s book co-written with Dennis Rodman that landed him on “The Tonight Show.” His daughter goes to school in Claremont.
“I’m the most chill person,” he said. “This just rubbed me the wrong way.”
His 2025 book “Sunset Scares,” about forgotten movie monsters in a retirement home, was co-written with Oliver Robins, the child actor from “Poltergeist,” and illustrated by Jared Gagnon.
They handed Gagnon the text and a few parameters, Warburton said, and left the rest alone.
“The art can show what we don’t tell,” he said.
“Sunset Scares” went through four proof copies before they approved it. For the next book, set in Transylvania, Warburton said he researched for six months and then spent a week driving around Romania by himself.
“I didn’t want to write about Transylvania without actually being there,” he said.
Gagnon described the same instinct in his own terms. Drawing a real place means finding references first: “I would go to find some sort of resource or reference, and then I would take it from there.” Then, he said, “I, as always, put my own twist on it” — which is “what you can’t do with AI.”
Clients have asked him to come down on price. He doesn’t.
“I know what my work is worth,” he said. “I’m fine with competing with other people, but when I have to compete with a light switch that turns on and produces a book, it’s kind of frustrating.”
He said he knows artists who have lost commissions. Comparable U.S. figures are scarce, and writers and illustrators are usually counted separately. A 2024 Authors Guild survey of U.S. authors found 6% knew they had lost work to AI and half couldn’t say. A 2025 survey of 6,844 British illustrators by the Association of Illustrators put the figure at 32%, averaging £9,262 in lost work each.
American organizations have been setting rules rather than counting losses. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the field’s largest U.S. professional body, bars AI-generated work from submissions through its platform.
Warburton turned down a book for a convention last year when the organizers told him they planned to use AI art. The graphic designers he hires for posters, he said, are seeing less work.
Both think disclosure of AI use should appear somewhere a reader can see it. Warburton said the copyright page.
Warburton and Gagnon sell into the same market as Savo, and Warburton said the school never called him.
He also said he would have come to the school for nothing.
“For me, it’s a slap in the face,” he said. “How many other authors and artists live in this area are working so hard and get no recognition?”
‘The timing was perfect’
Director of Student Wellness, Access and Counseling Courtney Porter put the evening together in Claremont. She said Savo’s daughter, a former student, emailed her about her father just as the school was looking at family engagement money that had to be spent by Sept. 30.
“The first thought was, oh, let’s get books for everyone,” Porter said. “And then it’s like, oh, wait a minute, let’s do a whole community engagement around it.” The email and the deadline landed together: “The timing was perfect.”
She estimated the night cost “around $2,000 in grant funds,” including books and food. Federal rules require districts with Title I allocations above $500,000 to reserve at least 1% for family engagement. New Hampshire Department of Education guidance lists guest speakers, academic program night materials and reading materials among the allowable purchases. It does not address how a district should choose them.
The grant also paid Savo a fee for the appearance, in addition to the books the district bought from him. State guidance lists guest speakers as an allowable use of family engagement funds.
The book fit, Porter said, because it was written for middle schoolers and because of “the historical pieces of it.”
“It really kind of ties together reading, it ties together history, it ties together, like, bringing families together,” she said. “We have moms here with their kids, we have grandmas here with their kids.”
It was the school’s first author night, and she hopes it won’t be the last. Since announcing it, she said, she has learned that other staff members, and staff members’ children, have written books too.
What a child does with a book like that is the part Coffey finds hardest to predict, and the part she thinks about most.
She grew up with “The Scroobious Pip,” an Edward Lear poem left unfinished at his death, completed by Ogden Nash and illustrated in 1968 by Nancy Ekholm Burkert — whole pages of crowded, strange animals.
“I just spent hours and hours and hours staring at this thing,” she said. “I remembered it well into adulthood, so much so that I wanted it to be part of my daughter’s brain.” She tracked down a copy and gave it to her.
She is not sure what that did to her, exactly, but she has a guess.
“Did that kind of help me develop this love and fascination for visual communication?” she said. “Did it prime me at an early age for looking closely and thinking deeply about the wonder and the strangeness of a representation?”
What she loved was that no two books looked alike.
“Every book was different, and not just the story, but the pictures,” she said. “I really mourn for a future where kids are going to be introduced into a world that has been so genericized, all the edges rubbed down, all the sort of weirdness and wackiness pulled away.”
“Anything that’s routinized, over time, it just becomes flattening and boring and impoverishing.”