Why We Use AI to Illustrate Grandparent Books

Memolio uses AI to create personalised books for grandparents from real photos. Here’s the honest reason why — and why it matters.

<p>A lot of companies that make a personalised book for grandparents don’t use AI. They hire illustrators. They use templates. They swap in a child’s name and a hair colour and call it custom. Those are real businesses and there is nothing wrong with any of them.</p><p>When people find out that Memolio uses AI to illustrate every page, they sometimes expect a defence. They expect me to explain that the technology has come a long way, or that it’s the future, or that it’s just a tool. I usually don’t say any of that.</p><p>The real reason we use AI is simpler, and it has very little to do with tech.</p><p><strong>A bit of context first.</strong></p><p>A personalised book for grandparents, in our case, means something specific. It’s a 24-page hardcover that tells the actual life story of one real person, illustrated from their actual photos. Not a generic grandma character with glasses and a cardigan. Their grandma. At the age she was when she met her husband. In the village she grew up in. With the coat she used to wear.</p><p>So when someone asks why we don’t just commission a human artist instead, the honest answer is that we’ve thought about it.</p><h2>What a custom illustrated book for a real person would actually cost</h2><p><a href="https://rhh-agency.co.uk/portrait-painter-prices-uk-how-much-do-artists-charge-in">A portrait illustrator, working to this standard, charges somewhere between £200 and £800 for a single custom piece.</a> The rate depends on the artist, the complexity, and the style. Now multiply that by 16. That’s roughly how many illustrations you need to carry a 24-page life-story book from childhood to grandparenthood. Before you’ve paid for printing, binding, shipping or anything else, the illustration alone is running at four to five figures. And that’s assuming your illustrator is willing to keep one specific real person’s face consistent across every page, at different ages, in different scenes. Most won’t. The ones who will charge more. The timeline is measured in months, not weeks. The price puts it out of reach for almost any family who isn’t already wealthy.</p><p>This isn’t hypothetical. I actually looked into it. That’s the moment I understood what AI was making possible.</p><h2>The product didn’t exist before</h2><p>I want to be clear about this, because it’s the part most AI commentary skips. Memolio isn’t a cheaper version of something that already existed. A bespoke, illustrated life-story book, built from a specific grandparent’s real photos and real memories, was not a product you could buy before AI could paint faces. It was something a very wealthy family could commission from a portrait artist over six months. That was the entire market.</p><p>AI didn’t make this product cheaper. AI made this product exist. That’s a different thing, and I think it’s the thing that matters.</p><p>The knock-on effect is that the ceiling has been removed. A book that used to cost five figures and take half a year now takes about 20 minutes on WhatsApp to set up, and around two weeks from your first message to a hardcover on your kitchen table. Anyone can have it. That’s the part that moves me.</p><h2>You can ask it to try again</h2><p>The other thing AI changes is iteration. If an illustrator paints your grandmother and the hair isn’t quite right, you are looking at days of extra work and an awkward conversation about whether you can even push back without seeming ungrateful. In practice, most people just accept the first version.</p><p>With Memolio, if the hair isn’t right, you click regenerate. It takes a few seconds. You can do it up to 50 times per book, all included. You stay in control of every page. Nothing prints until you say it’s ready.</p><p>This bit, on its own, almost carries the argument for me. The product only works because you can keep trying. A custom illustrated book you can’t edit would be frustrating in a way that a mass-market book never is. The moment something becomes personal, the bar for “right” goes up. AI regeneration is what keeps that bar reachable.</p><h2>The honest bit about AI art</h2><p>I don’t want to pretend that AI illustration is automatically good. A lot of it is bad. Generic, shiny, soulless. Faces that look like everyone and no one. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. I don’t want to make that.</p><p>The difference, I’ve come to believe, is intention. AI without a specific person in mind produces a specific person who doesn’t exist. AI fed with a grandmother’s actual photographs, her village, her family, her wedding dress, the dog she had when she was nine, can produce something that makes a grandchild stop on a page and say <em>that’s her</em>.</p><p>That isn’t slop. That isn’t decoration. That’s the book doing its job.</p><p>The soul of a Memolio book isn’t in the brushstrokes. I’d be lying if I said it was. The soul is in the stories. The real memories, the real faces, the real lives. The AI serves that. It doesn’t replace it.</p><h2>What we’re trying to make</h2><p>We love human-made art. There is handmade work in the world that AI will never match, and I hope it never tries to. What we’re trying to make is something different. We’re trying to make the personalised book for grandparents that couldn’t exist before. At a price that means any family can give it. With enough control that it ends up actually feeling like the person it’s about.</p><p>That’s the honest reason we use AI. It’s the only reason that makes the product possible at all.</p><p>Memolio isn’t available to order yet, but if you’d like to follow the build and be first to know when we launch, you can <a href="https://memolio.io">join the list here</a>.</p><p><a href="https://memolio.io">Memolio homepage</a> · <a href="https://blog.memolio.io/p/warum-wir-ki-nutzen-um-groelternbucher">Dieser Beitrag ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar →</a></p>