Meta is testing an AI bedtime story app for people with no imagination

Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKitwhich creates AI-generated children’s stories with custom characters, settings, lessons and music. As the App Store listing assures parents, “You don’t have to write a single word.”

Finally, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using our imaginations.

StoryKit was first noticed in the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is testing StoryKit in select countries to see how parents like it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to create personalized, imaginative storybooks for children, noting that it uses AI safety filters without social features and is only available to users over 18.

To generate a story in the app, first select a character, which you can create by “[snapping] a picture of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” according to the App Store description. Then you describe the world of your story and choose a lesson, so you can “weave in values ​​like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture.”

The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly sends out stupid ideas like deepfake generators on Instagram and “perverted glasses.” By comparison, is it so bad to condemn children to soulless bedtime stories? Did we expect anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world? virtual reality work meetings?

People have their faults, but if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s making things up. We’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve existed. We don’t even have to come up with original stories about fairytale princesses and dragon slayers. We’ve always drawn from mythology, fables and other stories – the summer blockbuster movie is literally an age-old myth that came from the same tradition of oral storytelling.

Parents lead tiring, busy lives, but it’s always been possible to go to bed without using an inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt.

You might see how tempting it might be to pull out StoryKit when your child rejects your bookshelf full of children’s books and demands that you improvise an intergalactic story about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends and solve space mysteries. But do we really want to reject any opportunity for whimsy and silliness and instead outsource these moments of connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones?

Perhaps the moral of the story here is that we can choose not to live in a world where children are raised on bedtime stories written by great language models. Meta’s vision of the future may be antisocial and bleak, but we have the power to reject that reality.