With the maturity of image-generating artificial intelligence technology, the established forms and processes of visual image production in picture books are changing, providing new methods for the creation of visual narratives in story picture books. However, the performance of visual narratives in picture book images generated by artificial intelligence is still uncertain in terms of the ability to represent things, the ability to interact with readers, and the composition of the text. Therefore, by examining the images of picture books generated by artificial intelligence, their visual narrative capabilities and deficiencies were determined. The image-generating artificial intelligence platform Midjourney was used to produce some pages of the "Nian" picture book. The differences in visual narrative between the picture book images generated by Midjourney and the original images were comparatively analyzed from three aspects:conceptual function, interpersonal function and textual function. The picture book images generated by Midjourney could generate similar lines of sight of the characters, expression styles, environment colors, etc. to better realize the interpersonal meaning consistent with the original text. Conceptual meaning and compositional meaning could be presented consistently when there were two or fewer characters on the scene, the picture composition was simple, the continuity was good, and the amount of narrative information was small. However, it could not accurately generate pages with a large number of characters and complex or changeable picture compositions. The following conclusions are drawn from this. First, the story picture book images generated by Midjourney can excellently present the emotions of the characters and the atmosphere of the environment, and have strong ability to convey appeal. Second, the images generated by Midjourney can clearly interpret simple scenes, but in turn can only convey relatively single visual information. Therefore, Midjourney still needs further optimization in terms of algorithms and big data. Third, the 'picture book' generated by Midjourney can only be regarded as an illustration book and cannot express the various relationships between pictures and texts in the picture book. Under the current circumstances, it is impossible for a high-quality picture book to express visual narrative only through Midjourney.