We make children's books with AI. Here is what we owe artists and authors.

Someone I love, a young parent in Brooklyn, won't recommend joonoo.art to her friends. She isn't being unkind. She believes that comics and picture books made with AI hurt the people who write and draw for a living, and she doesn't want to help that along.

She is not alone. Many parents her age feel the same way, and they are exactly the parents I built joonoo.art for. I would rather answer them in the open than hope the objection goes away.

My answer, in short: the harm to artists and authors is real. It is also the first chapter of a longer story, one that reaches nearly every profession, including mine. Turning away from AI-made products will not protect anyone in that story. Changing the rules might.

What the critics have right

The AI tools that draw and write learned by studying the work of a great many artists and authors. Most of those people were never asked and never paid. Courts are still working out whether that was lawful, and so far they have not agreed with one another. The U.S. Copyright Office has said that this kind of training can do real economic damage to creators, through lost sales, lost licensing and a market crowded with machine-made work (summary).

The damage is already showing up in people's incomes. In the Association of Illustrators' 2026 survey of 549 illustrators, 46% said they knew they had lost work to generative AI, up from 32% a year earlier (report). That is a poll of a trade body's members, not a census, but it matches what illustrators have been saying for three years.

And I will say the plain thing about my own product. A joonoo.art comic is a book that no illustrator drew and no author wrote. Very few families could afford to commission a custom comic starring their own child, so I doubt we are taking many commissions away. That is true, and it is not the whole answer. The tools I use exist because of work that nobody paid for.

So when a parent tells me she is uneasy, I don't think she is confused or behind the times. I think she is paying attention.

Artists were first. They will not be last.

I have written software for about forty years. Today AI writes much of the code I once wrote by hand, and I built joonoo.art with its help. The skill I spent a career on is being automated in front of me. I am not saying that to claim equal injury with a freelance illustrator who has lost half her clients. I am saying it because the pattern is the same, and it is spreading.

The head of the International Monetary Fund said last month that AI could affect about 40% of jobs worldwide and about 60% in advanced economies like ours, with young people in entry-level roles among the most at risk (report). Those figures measure exposure, not layoffs. Some of those jobs will get easier and better paid. Others will shrink or vanish. Translators, photographers, paralegals, customer service staff and junior programmers are already finding out which group they are in.

What do we owe each other when a machine can do a large part of almost anyone's job? I believe much more capable AI is coming, and sooner than most people expect. I could be wrong about the timing, but I don't think I am wrong about the direction. If that is right, the question "what do we owe artists and authors?" is an early version of that bigger one.

I have spent a good part of this year trying to understand that pattern and not just worry about it. I built a scenario model of what AI does to jobs, called AI Workforce Sim, and released it as open source so that anyone can check my assumptions or change them. I have been writing up what it shows, one finding at a time, on LinkedIn. It offers scenarios, not predictions. The finding I can't stop thinking about is the one I titled "The young pay first": the cost of this transition lands earliest on people just starting their working lives. Those are the children we make these books for, a few years from now.

Why I don't think shunning AI will work

The strongest version of the objection goes like this: there is a difference between AI helping to make something and AI replacing the artist altogether, and joonoo.art is on the wrong side of that line. I take the point. The line is real today.

I just don't think it will hold. AI already helps write the software in your phone, sort the photos you take, translate the pages you read, answer the support line you call and place the ads you scroll past. Each year it moves closer to the centre of how things are made. A rule of "nothing made with AI" gets harder to follow every month, and before long it may be impossible to follow at all.

A boycott also lands on the wrong people. It falls hardest on small makers who say openly that they use AI, while larger companies that use it quietly go unnoticed. That rewards silence and punishes honesty.

Most of all, declining to buy an AI-made comic does not put a dollar in an illustrator's pocket. It asks individual parents to carry, one purchase at a time, a problem that only shared rules can solve.

What would help

I am an engineer, not a policymaker, and thoughtful people disagree about the right mix. But these are the kinds of changes I think deserve our energy:

• Permission and payment for training. In the same AOI survey, 98% of illustrators said AI companies should ask before training on their work. Licensing deals between AI companies and rights holders have started to appear. Creators should be able to say yes, say no and get paid.
• Honest labelling. People have a right to know when a book, a picture or a voice was made by AI. No one should have to guess.
• Real support for people whose work is displaced. That means income while they retrain, benefits that follow the person and not the job, and a serious conversation about how the gains from AI are shared. It should cover the illustrator, the translator, the call-centre worker and the programmer alike.

None of this happens through shopping choices. It happens when enough of us ask our representatives for it. The parents who are uneasy about AI art are the people most likely to do that, and I would rather stand with them than argue with them.

What joonoo.art does in the meantime

I can't fix the rules alone, but I can decide how my own company behaves.

• We say plainly that our comics and picture books are written and illustrated by AI. We never call them hand-drawn.
• We never ask the AI to copy a living artist or studio, and we remove requests that try. Our styles are broad traditions, not anyone's signature.
• If you want a hand-drawn book, we will tell you to hire a local illustrator, and we mean it.
• I hope that artists and authors can one day take part in joonoo.art and be paid for it. I don't have a plan to announce yet, and I won't pretend that I do.

I started this for my granddaughter. She reads along with me and repeats the phrases, and I wanted her to open a comic and find herself as the hero. Until recently that was something almost no family could have. I think it is worth making, and worth making honestly.

If you still say no

If you read all this and still decide not to buy from us, I understand, and I won't think less of you. I would ask one thing. Put the same conviction into the rules: permission and pay for creators, honest labels, and help for everyone whose work AI takes over. That fight will protect artists and authors. It will also protect your job, and someday your children's.

If you think I have this wrong, write to me. I read every message, and I would rather be corrected than comfortable.

Saro Saravanan is the founder of joonoo.art and a granddad in Westborough, Massachusetts.