These FAKE AI Coloring Books Need To Stop.

Category: Art Commentary

Tags: AIartartistscoloringtransparency

Entities: AmazonCoco WyoColorfully OptimisticEtsyFantasy Fairy HomesMidJourneyMirror BerSquarespace

Transcript

00:00

Today's video is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website building platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Generating a coloring book with high quality using AI is not as easy as people think.

Try drawing it by hand. Hi there.

How you all doing? I hope you're all doing well.

So, today I want to talk specifically

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about something that's been bothering me. At first, it was kind of just a bit harmless, like, oh, that's a bit annoying, that's a bit weird, whatever.

But over time, the more I keep seeing videos of people that are getting fobbed off, life getting harder for artists, especially small artists. And any time,

00:34

which isn't very often, by the way, I hardly ever talk about this. Anytime I talk about something related to AI, there are such differing opinions.

Today, specifically, I want to talk about AI coloring books and the huge influx and problem that we're experiencing pretty much everywhere on a

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day-to-day basis at this point. The more time I spend on the internet, the more I keep seeing AI coloring books pop up pretty much everywhere.

I've been seeing this more and more online and it is a real problem that I think that we should talk about and discuss. My personal opinion on AI is I think it definitely has benefits.

Absolutely. I think that

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in many ways AI will be very helpful and beneficial to a lot of different fields including art. Like if people want to use AI to generate an image as like a reference picture or just to kind of give them ideas for things, that is more of an innocent way to use it.

But when it comes to people buying something that

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they expect to be handmade by an actual artist only to receive something generated by AI in 5 seconds, that's when I have a problem. Recently, my friend Mirror Ber, she actually purchased a coloring book from Amazon.

Thought she'd make a fun video out of it, only to discover the whole book was basically AI. And AI is usually quite

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easy to spot. Like you can usually tell if something is AI to an extent, but it's getting better and better to the point where it's so much harder now to just spot if it actually is or not.

And the other day I was on Amazon searching for some coloring books myself and I spotted something that was very, very

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odd. One of the blatant like AI coloring book telltale signs that something's, you know, made with AI is there's usually not going to be an artist or an author listed on the coloring book.

But people have gotten smarter. The other day I was on Amazon for example and I found a coloring book that had quite a

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lot of reviews with an artist name with a picture of said artist and I can't find any information about this person anywhere. Like I googled the name and I couldn't find any information online.

Could this artist exist? Sure.

But I mean based on the comments it's AI. It

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just feels morally wrong. Especially when people don't say specifically this is made with AI because a lot of the time it doesn't say that.

Disclaimer. I am not going to be outright stating anything is blatantly made with AI unless it clearly states that it is or

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it's ridiculously apparent. Everything I state in this video is an opinion and me simply sharing other people's comments and opinions online.

I found this coloring book recently on Amazon. It's called Fantasy Fairy Homes, an adult coloring book full of whimsical block line and grayscale images.

And at first

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it looks like, oh, this is really, really cute. I like the look of this.

And you kind of scroll over, what's this about? This coloring book is perfect for anyone who loves to color and explore fantastical worlds and is especially great for fairy enthusiasts.

So, let your imagination fly as you bring these enchanting homes to life through the magic of coloring. And you kind of like

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look at the pictures on the back and it's like suspicious. I was half tempted to buy some of these book as an example for this video, but I also don't want to support AI made coloring books personally.

I would rather spend my money supporting real artists who spend months if not years making a coloring

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book. But just a quick glance at this on the back, even though the quality is not the best, one of the first telltale signs I noticed was the fact it was kind of like half shaded.

And these coloring books don't make sense to me because how are you supposed to color something that's already got like that shading on it? It doesn't really make it very easy

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to color in in the first place. But I thought maybe it is handmade.

Maybe I'm being unfair. But this right here, for example, like you zoom in and these flowery things, they don't make sense.

like it just doesn't make sense because AI can make some pretty artwork, but it doesn't always do the best job of the details. So, if you zoom into something,

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that's usually where you can tell something isn't quite right. For this coloring page right here, it doesn't really make sense.

The little triangle above the door, it kind of just the way it blends into the roof is not quite right. And then you have this window which looks like it's been flipped.

Like these windows need to be flipped. They

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don't look right. They've been put on the house wrong.

And this isn't just like a basic artist mistake. This is just what AI does.

It looks good, but there's always something slightly off with it. And one of the first reviews literally said, "This is AI generated images, but very good." Beware, AI generated.

I like the concept of this

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coloring book so much. I don't mind the pages are thin, but these images are made with an AI generator, so the images are not very detailed and very complicated to color in.

AI tried to figure out what cottages look like. After starting to color and realizing I felt frustrated, not relaxed, which is the entire point of a coloring book, is

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it not? The blades of grass I was working on inexplicably started to morph into who knows what.

I started to flip through to try to find a page that wasn't so baffling. That's when I started noticing doors that fade into blackness and so many random little flourishes in places that didn't make any sense until I made the realization

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that this whole book is AI generated images. While I definitely think AI art is dumb, same.

I would have at least continued coloring since I'd already purchased. However, it is infuriating to try to color because there are so many places that don't have clear lines or figures because it's AI.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one. Go and support

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a real human artist who actually illustrated their book. So, you can kind of see the pictures that they posted.

Like, it's all grayscale. How are you supposed to color that in exactly?

It's supposed to be a coloring book. This is wonky.

It looks like the Eiffel Tower on the soaring ride Epcot. There's a weird

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door in there for some reason. And just none of the image sort of makes sense, right?

And when you click on it, we're excited to introduce our latest collection featuring beautifully handdrawn illustrations by our talented in-house artists. While we continue to offer our popular generative designs,

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we're committed to supporting human creativity and artistry. So, I don't know which books they're talking about are hand illustrated, but if you are a publishing company who supports generative images as well as actual artists, you're not really supporting artists at all because AI literally

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takes and uses images it finds online to generate images from other artists. That's why AI is not quite right.

It's taking art that it finds online from actual artists and smashing it together. I don't know.

I recently made a video about Etsy and how AI has really kind of like ruined Etsy where people have been

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making AI art selling it and it's kind of overtaken the platform to where real artists listings are getting shut down, hidden, and there was a whole bunch of issues, but AI was one of them that I discussed. And the amount of comments I got being like, you got to move on with the times or you're just jealous.

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Apparently, I'm jealous of AI. I don't know why I would be jealous of AI, but apparently I am.

Here's another book, for example. 4.4 four stars, 273 reviews.

It once again doesn't look quite right at first glance, and it's not till you zoom in that you really realize there's some things that aren't

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quite right. Firstly, there is no illustrator listed on this book anywhere.

And again, the reviews are basically saying the images are AI. Some people care, some people don't really care, and they've posted examples.

Like, if we zoom in on this curtain here, I don't really know what's going on with the details in that spot. But it's those

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little things that don't quite look right that make it difficult, you know? It makes it difficult to color in because you're like, "What's this weird shape?

How am I supposed to do anything with that?" So, while there are a good portion of people that really do not care the AI books exist. I think most people do.

And I think the issue isn't

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so much the AI coloring book itself, it's more so the fact that people aren't made aware that they're buying an AI book until they receive it. So, you have people that are spending their money thinking they're getting a decent quality coloring book.

A lot of the time, the coloring book not being decent quality. people getting stressed because

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the coloring page is really difficult to color in because it's just not cohesive. It's not really working right.

Then you also have the issue of artists who spend months and months and months, sometimes years, working on a coloring book only to now have everything flooded with ones made by AI. And of course, there's the whole moral implication of the fact that

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people don't even say this book is made with AI. It would be very simple.

I'm guessing it's kind of like a legal obligation as well, but none of these books anywhere that I could see said these are made with AI. So, this is one that really threw me off originally.

Part of the Grayscale coloring book series. As you can see, it's got decent

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reviews, 60 reviews, but they all have that sort of the something's not quite right look to them. But there's a ton of these like grayscale coloring books here, as well as a bunch of random ones at the top with completely different styles entirely.

One of the things that really like sticks out is when a

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coloring book, for example, has 16 different styles. So, you have a really, really detailed, amazing portrait of a woman.

Then you have another detailed portrait of a woman, but it looks like a completely different person's done it. Which is fine if the coloring book is made by multiple people, but usually a

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coloring book is made by one person. And again, I wasn't too sure because obviously I don't like to just be like, "That's AI definitely." You know, I don't want to be that person.

However, when you search AI, again, it's the reviews. I was given this book for my birthday.

I was so excited to get it, but I'm very disappointed. Pictures are

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cut off at the top or on the sides. Some pictures have items in them that don't belong, and you can't tell what they're supposed to be.

I know it is an AI book, but why publish and sell a book with all these mistakes? AI generated images.

See my marked up photos of one of the pages. I've circled some of the items that are unidentifiable.

This book was clearly AI

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generated, and they couldn't even bother to go back and fix the mistakes. All in order to make a quick buck.

So, you look at these images, and it's like, what the heck is that? Is that supposed to be a stocking?

There's two of the same one on the tree. And again, it's got that kind of shading that makes it more difficult to color in.

And it's an independently published, meaning that Amazon will

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publish it for you once somebody buys it. So, it's basically like self-publishing where you upload it to Amazon and they will print it for you.

The quality of the paper isn't the best, but it's something that anyone can do and people are doing to make money, but nowhere I can see does this say that it's made by AI or generated or

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anything. And then the author authored over 100 publications, including children's educational, coloring, and activity books.

When I search her name, I can't see any information about her other than the books that are sold with the name. I even went so far as to upload her image to Google Lens just to kind of see if I could do like a reverse

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image search or find anything else about her. But literally the only picture that pops up with that image is the Amazon page where the books are sold.

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When you go to bookshop.org, for example, there's this book right here. And every single creature on this page is completely different.

They're not handdrawn by the same person. I'm going to say that because you have a 3D lion, then you

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have a 2D sheep, then you have an alligator there that's like sort of got a bit of whatever that is. Every creature has completely different eyeballs.

And that's like I mean that looks nothing like any of the others either. All I'm saying is when I try to do my research, when I'm trying to buy a coloring book, I want to see a bit more

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information about the author, about the person behind the scenes. Maybe an Instagram, maybe a profile like a LinkedIn or something, but there was nothing anywhere.

And then you have videos like this on YouTube and Tik Tok. Create an adult coloring book like this one using Canva and AI.

I created this

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one and I can show you exactly how I did it. It's just a whole tutorial basically on how you can make a Cocoa Wo style coloring book.

And I recently made a video where I tried out the Coco Wu coloring books. And I actually had a handful of people tell me that they thought it was AI, but Coco Wire books are handdrawn.

There is a whole

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Instagram page about it. They are not AI generated images.

They're all very cohesive, very much the same. There's no like three limbs on any of the characters.

It is handdrawn and they specify that. There's proof of it, but there are so many knockoffs out there that are trying to replicate the Coco Wyo popularity.

Some are genuinely

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handdrawn by actual artists, others are AI generated, and there's people online showing people how to do it. Okay, this was another one.

I zoomed in to these cute little chair babies here and I'm like I'm looking at the fingers. This is this is the first thing I always do is I look at the fingers, but I think most people know it's the fingers that give

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it away, right? But I think most of them have been done in a way the fingers are either hidden or they actually have four fingers and one thumb.

You know, they're corrected. So people are like, "Oh, there's enough fingers on that one, so it must not be AI." But then I think this one was a little bit of a misstep because this little boy in the corner

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here, he has four fingers. Like what is that?

That is not a thumb. A lot of the books love to be fantasy house themed as well, I've noticed.

So, I found this video by Colorfully Optimistic, and she basically went through an entire fantasy home coloring book for adults where she basically picked out what was blatantly

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AI and what wasn't. But then their line weights, as you can see, don't match up with the drawing.

The line art itself doesn't even match the quality of this basic line art. So, as they're saying in the video here, you can look at the line weight.

The line weight is very different on each

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different part. The image itself doesn't make sense.

Like once again, it's the windows. They're kind of giving it away a little bit.

The style is different throughout the book. Like you have a very, very basic door, then a slightly more detailed mirror, then the flowers, which are ridiculously detailed, much thinner, and it just looks out of place.

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And I saw this Reddit post recently that says, I saw a YouTube video recently where someone made 400 bucks in just 15 days by selling AI generated coloring books online. The YouTuber used text image AI to generate coloring book pages and then even used AI to color the pages, creating both the coloring and

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colored versions of the book. I'm a student majoring in literature, so I know nothing about designing or painting, but the money made from this is really alluring.

It looks like you don't need any art skills to do this anymore. It sounds almost too good to be true.

So, has anyone given AI generated coloring books a shot? So, a literature student wants to make money selling AI

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generated images because they can't draw themselves, which is kind of ironic considering there's a lot of AI written books out there. And I'm sure a literature student or somebody that's writing their own book is very upset that AI is pushing out handwritten books.

I'm just I'm just saying it's just kind of ironic. It was a great idea

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at some and then thousands of people learned about doing it easily with MidJourney and now there are tens of thousands of coloring books on sale all over the internet each getting two sales a year. Yeah.

Now imagine being an artist who spent 9 months plus making their own coloring book. because of your

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coloring books flooding the internet. The actual handmade ones don't get to see the light a day cuz they're competing with AI ones, right?

Like that get made in 5 minutes. The issue is AI is not good at minute details.

That's true. No AI today can make it in one click.

Still needs some handiwork to

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make a so coloring book, but somehow it's quicker to get some 70%. Agreed.

Generating a coloring book with high quality using AI is not as easy as people think. Try drawing it by hand.

The problem with AI is every second AI YouTuber giving you their amazing gold making tips is a fraud. They didn't make

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any money themselves. They try to sell you memberships for their sites they'll benefit of.

Oh, sad. I get people are trying to make money here.

Like, I get that. But the people that suffer are the people that buy it and don't know that it's AI.

It's not cohesive, doesn't work, and it's not relaxing whatsoever because of it. Real artists are getting

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pushed out. And the worst part of it all is these AI generated coloring books are selling for the same price as handdrawn ones.

This is so messed up. I know I'm going to have people that have never been to my channel before, don't know who I am.

I'm lucky AI doesn't really affect me. I'm angry for the people that

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it does affect. I have a platform that I have worked very hard to grow over the last few years.

I didn't do the shortcut. I didn't grow with shorts.

Okay, just putting that out there. I've grown my channel mostly with long form content, which is the slow and steady hard way.

And I have my own activity book. So, the reason I know how it feels

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for these smaller artists is I know how long it takes to make a book because I have a book with a publisher. So, this is my book.

I hand drew everything inside here. And these aren't even like fully fully detailed coloring pages.

This is an art activity book. So, it's kind of essentially you complete some of

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the images yourself. It's also a story, so it follows like a cohesive story line.

This book took me about 4 months to do. and it could have taken me even longer, but because it was a published book with the publisher, I had a timeline that I had to meet in order to get it finished.

So, if you're an artist doing this at your own leisure, for

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example, you might be taking months and months and months, if not years, to do this. And maybe you don't have an audience, maybe you don't have a following, but you want to make your own coloring book and self-publish it on Amazon.

But then comes along these AI books which is selling for the same price your handdrawn one is, and making

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it harder for yours to be seen. You know, it it's really frustrating for people.

And I'm frustrated on behalf of the people that this really does truly affect. And then you go to Tik Tok and you see so many people that are very frustrated that their coloring books they purchased are made with AI and they didn't realize.

Is that supposed to be a

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goat or a horse or something? Why does it butt blend into the window?

That's weird. This guy Oh, that's What the heck is that?

He's doing his whole like Titanic thing, you know, on the front of the boat there. I don't know what he is.

Yeah. What is even Is there a house on

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the boat? Is that like It's like a house front, but then the back is a cloud.

I mean, I'm so confused. That makes no sense.

Because they all have like six fingers, but he has sheep hands. He has sheep hands.

His hand is a sheep foot thing. Like, his hand is a literal sheep foot.

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What? What is this?

What? That's Well, that's the Loch Ness monster clearly.

That is hilarious. I want this guy.

Whoa. What is that thing?

That is bizarre. I don't even know what to say.

People are getting fobbed off and they don't realize it. So, it's really

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frustrating. This person's mom bought an AI generated coloring book, which is another thing, too.

There's older generations that maybe want to buy a coloring book, they see it online, think, "Oh, that's a really nice one." They get it and then they receive whatever this is, and it's not easy to color in. That's the thing.

It's not

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easy to color in in the first place. Just none of it makes sense.

It has three paws. Four P four paws.

flower pots and landscapes. What in the heck is that?

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It's got like a baby foot and then it's just Yeah, cuz see he found this in Five Below as well. He found an AI generated book in Five Below and I don't know if it's just a thing, but I also thought I found one in Five Below that was AI generated.

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What the h E C K is this? Seriously, I bought it on Amazon so I couldn't tell.

It's sad. People are spending their money on something they don't realize is made with AI.

So, if you are a small artist and you have made your own coloring book and you're self-publishing it, feel free to

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self-promote. Leave a comment down below telling us what your coloring book is called, where you can buy it, because I want to start a nice thread of people that have handmade their books.

It feels like every turn something new is changing that's making life harder for artists. I don't see anything wrong with making your own coloring books and

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generating your own images, but I think it's really just a little bit wrong when you have people handmaking their coloring books and they're just getting pushed out by the generated ones, you know, because at the end of the day, a lot of people just do not care. They want to make money.

They're going to use AI. There is nothing we can do to stop

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it. Apparently, if you self-publish on Amazon, you have to state explicitly that something is generated with AI.

But the sad thing is, all I see are coloring books on there that are blatantly made with AI. If you're an artist, I hear you.

I see you. I wanted to talk about this because it is such an ongoing

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problem. Is there anything that we're going to really be able to do about it?

Unfortunately, I don't think so because it's just the people that buy these books that are kind of doing their research, they all want to support actual artists. I think the reason why so many of these books don't state they're made with AI is because they know it's going to put people off.

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People like to feel personable with things. I could never watch an AI generated YouTuber because it's just not a real person.

Same with these coloring books. So many of the pages are so just even if they're good quality and they're well-made AI images, usually the style is very different and you want a

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coloring book that the style is just completely cohesive. So let me know your thoughts down below.

And again, if you are a small business or an artist who makes your own coloring books, feel free to leave the name of it in the comments down below because I'd love to check them out because myself and I'm sure many people watching this video would love to check out handmade coloring

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books. So for now, thank you so much for watching this video.

I hope that it was insightful. Feel free to join us in the comments down below talking about this issue, your thoughts, and what you think we can do about it.

But for now, thank you so much for watching this video. Take care of yourselves, and I will see you in the next video.

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