Meta is working on an AI-powered storytelling app called Story Kitthat 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 type a single word.”
Finally, a technology company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using our imagination.
StoryKit was first spotted on the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is testing StoryKit in select countries to see if parents like it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to create imaginative, personalized storybooks for your children, noting that it uses artificial intelligence safety filters with no social features and is only available to users over 18 years of age.
To generate a story in the app, you first select a character, which you can create by “(taking) a photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” according to the description in the App Store. Then, describe the world of your story and choose a lesson so you can “weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it seeming like a sermon.”
The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly sends outlandish ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “perverted glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to condemn children to telling soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected better from the company that promised us a utopian world of work meetings in virtual reality?
Humans have their flaws, but if we are good at something, it is inventing things. We have been telling stories since we existed. We don’t even have to invent original tales about fairy princesses and dragon slayers. We have always relied on mythology, fables and other stories: the summer blockbuster movie It is literally an ancient myth that originated from this same tradition of oral storytelling.
Parents lead busy, exhausting lives, but it has always been possible to survive bedtime without using inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a cue.
You can see how tempting it can be to turn to 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 the possibility of fantasy and nonsense and instead outsource these moments of connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones?
Perhaps the moral of the story is that we can choose not to live in a world where children grow up with 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.
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