Little Kea is a Hawaii-born children's brand making books, shirts, and cards for keiki ages 2-4. We're a small family operation - AI-first by design, Hawaiian at heart. This post is part of an ongoing series about how we build Little Kea, why we chose to use AI, and what we think it means to raise kids in a world where this technology is just part of life. Learn more about us here.

There's a question we get asked a lot, usually framed as a concern: you used AI to make a children's book?

The short answer is yes. And we're not hiding from that.

Little Kea is an AI-first company. That's a deliberate choice, and it goes back further than you might think - back to around 2020, 2021, before we even had kids. I was using an early AI writing tool called Jarvis, which most people now know as Jasper AI. It was rough. It was wrong half the time. But I could see what it was becoming. The trajectory was obvious to anyone paying attention, and I was paying attention.

When our son Rory came along, something clicked. I thought: this kid is going to grow up in a world where AI is just there. Like electricity. Like the internet. He's never going to know a world without it - so why would we build a brand that pretends otherwise?

That's the honest answer. Little Kea isn't AI-first because it was cheaper or faster, though those things are true for a small family operation. It's AI-first because it's honest. Because Rory is growing up in that reality, and so are your kids.

Now, I want to be clear about something. We don't know how all of this turns out. Not in a scary way - just in an honest way. This technology is going to be transformative in ways none of us can fully predict. And I'd rather lean into that uncertainty than pretend it isn't there.

There's a line I keep coming back to: you can create with this, or you can consume with it. We chose to create. Every image in our book, every character, every scene - it came from a real moment, a real memory, a real place. AI was the tool. The story was always ours.

Sade writes every word. That's not a footnote - that's the whole point. The Hawaiian roots, the spirit of the islands - that comes from her, from Kauai, from Kamehameha Schools, from a childhood that AI could never replicate. What AI did was make it possible for a small family, working with limited resources, to bring that story to life visually.

We think that's worth talking about. Not because we have all the answers, but because your kids are growing up in this too. And the conversation has to start somewhere.

For us, it started with a children's book about big trucks.

Little Kea's Big Trucks is available now. Read more about how we make everything - or explore the full collection.