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

Meta works with 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 have to write a single word.”

Finally, a tech company has found a way to take out an old pastime of humans: using our imaginations.

StoryKit was first spotted on the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is testing StoryKit in certain countries to see how parents like it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a storytelling app used to design 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 start by choosing a character, which you can create by “[snapping] a picture of their favorite toy or someone who will bring them to life,” according to the description available in the App Store.” After that, you describe the world of your story and choose a subject, to “incorporate values ​​like kindness, courage, or empathy without feeling like a speech.”

The good news about StoryKit is that it could be worse. Meta often posts heady ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “distorting mirrors.” In comparison, is it so bad to condemn children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected something better from a company that promised us a utopian world of virtual work meetings?

People have their faults, but if we’re good at anything, it’s fixing things. We have been telling stories for a long time. We don’t even have to answer real tales of fairy princesses and dragon slayers. We’ve been drawing from myths, legends, and other stories – the summer blockbuster movie is a classic myth that stems from this same oral storytelling practice.

Parents lead busy, busy lives, but it’s always been possible to survive during sleep without using natural, non-design technology that calculates a highly predictable response to information.

You can see how tempting it can be to pull out StoryKit when your child rejects your book bag full of children’s books and wants you to develop a fairy tale about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends and solve the mysteries of space. But do we really want to reject the possibility of selfishness and stupidity and instead release these moments of connecting and reading AI-generated texts on our smartphones?

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