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Meta tests AI app for children’s bedtime stories
Meta is piloting StoryKit, an AI app that creates personalized children’s bedtime stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music.
Image: StoryKit (opens in a new window)
Meta is testing StoryKit, an AI storytelling app that generates personalized children’s books with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. Its App Store listing promises parents: “You don’t need to write a single word.”
The app was first spotted on the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is piloting StoryKit in select countries to gauge parents' response.
How Meta’s StoryKit works
StoryKit is designed for adults and has no social features. Meta says it includes AI safety filters and is available only to users over 18.
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To create a story, users select a character—or photograph a favorite toy or person to bring that character to life—then describe the story’s world and choose a lesson. The app can incorporate values such as “kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture.”
The case against AI bedtime stories
StoryKit is less alarming than some of Meta’s other experiments, including Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Still, it raises a more fundamental question about what gets lost when parents outsource improvised storytelling to a smartphone.
Parents are busy, and an app could be tempting when a child demands an improvised tale about, say, a turtle and a hedgehog solving mysteries in space. But bedtime stories have long offered a chance for silliness, invention, and connection—even when the plot borrows from mythology, fables, or familiar books.
Meta’s pilot does not force families to use StoryKit. Parents can still choose to make up their own stories, rather than rely on scripts generated by large language models.
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via TechCrunch
