Growing Like Weeds

The Supreme Court may decide whether the output of an AI system can be copyrighted — a question I might have ignored if I didn’t use AI to create children’s books with my daughter.

A friend once confirmed a thought I had when my daughter, Elise, was about two years old: seventy-five–page coloring books are a waste of money. Yes, fine motor skills matter. Yes, you can buy coloring books with detachable pages. The problem is that the actual pictures are too small, and the paper disintegrates under the weight of crayons and enthusiasm. I’d toss one coloring book after another into the recycling bin, thinking about how, monetarily, this felt like the period of my life when I kept buying lace tops and wearing them in public. Nothing good came of that either.

I started making my own coloring sheets after a fateful trip to the Glen Cove Library last May, where they were handing out summer-themed pages. There are countless sites for free downloads (Free Winter Coloring Pages for Kids, for example), and eventually I began creating my own using a mix of Vecteezy and Google Images. The enduring appeal of Sandra Boynton is well deserved—yes, I will buy When Pigs Fly—but I found a new ritual in compiling the artwork of a four-year-old, adding words to the opposite page, and binding the collection at our local Staples.

About a year ago, I told a new friend over dinner about a children’s book I’d been shopping to literary agents. A direct quote from my query letter feels apt here:

“Fishing for Fruit is a story that resonates with preliterate and early readers, ages 3-6, who are learning how to connect with the world around them. This story revolves around the fact that some fish like the sweet smell and bright color of fruit, turning a fishing trip with grandpa into a fun lesson…”

After a year of polite rejection letters, I stopped sending it out. Six months later, I concluded that paying an illustrator wasn’t a financial priority, and the project quietly ended.

Except that it didn’t. I realized I could use my coloring-page technique in reverse. With AI, I could prompt images from my words. Elise could color them in. And if Thaler v. Perlmutter—the case before the Supreme Court—were decided in Stephen Thaler’s favor, our story, my words and her illustrations, could be fully copyright protected. No disclaimers necessary.

In a world where everyone is selling something, I’ve never wanted to sell our coloring-book-turned-children’s-book compilations. It almost feels like a betrayal to follow a new Instagram account only to discover there’s a book, shampoo, or line of vitamins being promoted. It’s no secret that people self-publish coloring books using free images all the time—I get it, I really do. But for me, half the fun of these little memento projects is creating stories from coloring pages that, even when grouped by theme, make absolutely no sense.

A successful outcome for Mr. Thaler would mean that even prompting AI to create an image my daughter colors in blurs the line between her fun and potential profit. The copyrightability of AI-generated imagery doesn’t make our mommy-daughter projects any less special—but it does make me hold them a little closer.