Over the past three years, students hired as “Community Literacy Activists” (CLAs) worked to write graded, young adult multicultural stories based in various Asian countries in both English and Japanese. The processes involved students writing original stories, simplifying them and translating them between English and Japanese. An illustrator team completed illustrations and a team of voice actors created the audio books. Students tagged their work records with project tags. Another team of CLAs were tasked to use Chat GPT and other AI tools to create similar stories for other country settings. Similar tags were used to track the time and cost of creating stories with AI. In the spring of 2023, we hosted an event where university students (including CLAs) were invited to use Chat GPT and other AI tools to create similar stories for other country settings. AI prompts and tools were recorded in the process of creating stories with AI and similar tags were used to track the time on different tasks. CLAs who experienced both human and AI processes were invited to participate in a recorded focus group. The results of this comparison will be the focus of the poster, with Implications drawn for student-authored graded readers, both with and without AI assistance.