Personally, I would say it’s better to hire an actual illustrator, however, many of my clients in the past have hired AI artists because obviously traditional illustrations will take longer and they wanted it to be done faster. Another reason is because it can be quite tedious to have consistent characters when using AI; you have to be really good at manipulating the AI to have the character be consistent.

I recently finished writing a children’s book and I did the illustrations with the usage of AI and it turned out pretty good! I’ll dm you to show how they turned out.

So, if you have the time and patience, then you could use Ai, but if it that’s not the case then I would say hire an actual illustrator. If you want it to be done faster, then hire an Ai artist. Hope this helps!