Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKit, which creates AI-generated children’s stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. As the App Store listing assures parents, “You don’t need to write a single word.”
At last, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using our imaginations.
StoryKit was first spotted in the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is piloting StoryKit in select countries to see how parents like it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to craft personalized, imaginative storybooks for their children and noted that it uses AI safety filters with no social features and is only available to users over the age of 18.
To generate a story in the app, you first select a character, which you can create by “[snapping] a photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” according to the description in the App Store. Then, you describe the world of your story and choose a lesson, so that 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 ships boneheaded ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world of virtual reality work meetings?
Humans have their faults, but if we’re good at anything, it’s making stuff up. We’ve been telling stories for as long as we’ve existed. We don’t even have to spin up original tales of fairy princesses and dragon slayers. We have always drawn from mythology, fables, and other stories — the blockbuster movie of the summer is literally an ancient myth that orginated from this same tradition of oral storytelling.
Parents lead exhausting, busy lives, but it has always been possible to survive bedtime without using an inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt.
You could see how it might be tempting to pull up StoryKit when your kid rejects your bookcase full of children’s books and demands that you improvise an intergalactic tale about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends and solve space mysteries. But do we really want to reject a chance at 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 large language models. Meta’s vision of the future may be antisocial and bleak, but we have the power to reject that reality.
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