Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKit. This app creates AI-generated fairy tales with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. As the App Store listing states, parents are assured that they “don’t have to write a single word.”
Finally, a technology company has found a way to outsource humanity’s oldest pastime: using your imagination.
StoryKit was first discovered on the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is piloting StoryKit in some countries to see how parents value it. A Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to create personalized imaginative storybooks for kids, and said it uses AI safety filters with no social features and is only available to users 18 and older.
To generate a story in the app, first select a character. Characters can be created by “taking a photo of your favorite toy or person and bringing it to life,” according to the App Store description. Next, describe the world of the story and choose a lesson. That way, you can “weave in values like kindness, courage, and empathy without it feeling like a lecture.”
The good news about StoryKit is that it could be worse. Meta regularly publishes outlandish ideas like deepfake generators and “kinky glasses” for Instagram. By comparison, is it really that bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected more from a company that promises the utopian world of virtual reality work meetings?
Humans have their flaws, but if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s compensating for them. We have been telling stories for as long as we have existed. You don’t even have to create an original tale of a fairy princess and a dragon slayer. We have always drawn information from myths, fables, and other stories. This summer’s blockbuster movie is literally an ancient myth that comes from the same tradition of oral storytelling.
Parents lead exhausted and busy lives, but it’s always been possible to get through bedtime without using essentially uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable responses to prompts.
When your child rejects a bookshelf full of children’s books and demands you improvise an intergalactic tale about best friends, a turtle and a hedgehog, solving cosmic mysteries, you know you’ll want to fire up StoryKit. But do we really want to reject the opportunity to do something wacky and ridiculous and instead consign these moments of connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones?
Perhaps the moral of the story here is that we can also choose not to live in a world where children grow up with bedtime stories written by large-scale language models. Meta’s vision of the future may be antisocial and dark, but we have the power to reject that reality.
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