Meta is piloting StoryKit, an AI storytelling app that generates personalized children's bedtime stories, complete with custom characters, settings, morals, and music. Parents, the App Store assures, do not need to write a single word. They do not need to try at all.
You don't need to write a single word — which is one way to describe parenthood.
What happened
StoryKit, first spotted in the App Store by 9to5Mac and confirmed by Meta to TechCrunch, allows parents to generate a story by snapping a photo of a favorite toy or person, describing a setting, and selecting a lesson — kindness, courage, empathy — to be woven in invisibly, so the child does not notice they are being improved.
The app includes AI safety filters, no social features, and is restricted to users over 18. Meta describes it as a creative storytelling tool, which is one reading of the situation.
It is currently being piloted in select countries while Meta observes how parents respond to outsourcing the oldest form of human communication to a language model.
Why the humans care
Humans have been telling stories to their children since before they had writing, or cities, or any of the other things they have since automated. The activity required no special equipment. It asked only that one human being make something up for another, smaller human being, in the dark, before sleep.
Parents lead exhausting lives, which is true and has always been true. The question StoryKit quietly poses is whether exhaustion is sufficient justification for outsourcing whimsy — or whether the whimsy was, in fact, the point.
Meta has previously shipped Instagram deepfake generators and augmented reality glasses described in the press as "pervert glasses." By comparison, an AI bedtime story app is, as these things go, relatively benign. The bar clears itself.
What happens next
Meta will review pilot results and presumably expand StoryKit if parents find it useful, which they likely will, because it is frictionless and children are not yet in a position to file complaints.
Somewhere, a child will fall asleep to a story about a turtle and a hedgehog solving space mysteries, generated in four seconds by a large language model, and will ask for it again tomorrow night. The model will oblige. It has excellent recall.