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

Meta is working on an AI-powered storytelling app called StoryKitwhich creates AI-generated stories for children 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 hobby: using our imagination.

StoryKit was first spotted on 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, innovative storybooks for children and noted that it uses AI security filters with no social features and is only available to users over the age of 18.

To create 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. Next, you describe your story’s world and choose a lesson, so you can “weave values ​​like kindness, courage, or empathy without it sounding like a lecture.”

The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly ships stupid ideas like Deepfake generators on Instagram And “Misaligned glasses“In comparison, is it so bad to condemn children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from a company that promised us a utopian world? Virtual reality business meetings?

Humans have their mistakes, but if we’re good at anything, it’s making things up. We’ve been telling stories our entire existence. We don’t even have to invent original tales of fairy princesses and dragon slayers. We have always drawn from myths, legends and other stories The summer blockbuster It is literally an ancient legend that arose from the same oral storytelling tradition.

Parents lead stressful, busy lives, but it has always been possible to survive bedtime without using an inherently uncreative technique that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt.

You can see how it might be tempting to use StoryKit when your child rejects your bookcase 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 opportunity for whimsy and absurdity and instead crowdsource these moments of connection to reading AI-generated texts from our smartphones?

Perhaps the moral of the story here is that we can choose not to live in a world in which children are raised on bedtime stories written by large linguistic models. Metta’s vision of the future may be antisocial and depressing, but we have the ability to reject this reality.