Meta Working on Crushingly Sad AI App That Tells Bedtime Stories to Children, for "Tired" Parents

Meta is testing an app that uses AI to automate bedtime stories for children. The future is here, folks — and boy, is it depressing.

The app, first caught by 9to5Mac, is called “StoryKit.” (It’s not yet available in the US; Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s currently testing StoryKit in pilot countries.) Per a webpage for the app, parents pick a character either by creating one or taking a “photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life,” then describe a setting or world for the story to take place in. They can also ask the story to include a specific lesson or moral, which the app says will allow it to “weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture.”

The resulting story can be read aloud by a human — or, of course, an AI voice can narrate instead. According to Meta, this is a lifeline for exhausted parents.

“Tired after a long day but want to give your kids a special bedtime story?” reads the app’s webpage. “StoryKit uses Al to help you create personalized bedtime stories in seconds. No more guilt about screen time. Just beautiful, unique stories made with love.”

Let’s be real: this app is amazingly sad. There are a lot of busy and exhausted parents, but outsourcing the emotional and creative labor of bedtime stories to machines is a wildly bleak proposition. Meta claims that this app will help parents feel less guilty about their kids’ screen time, but is having an AI voice read an AI-generated bedtime story to your kids that much different from plopping them in front of an iPad?

There are also countless human-written children’s books out there to choose from, if parents don’t enjoy coming up with stories with their kids on the spot. If you’re feeling guilty about screens, perhaps the answer is paper-bound books, not robots.

All in all: kids’ bedtime stories — bonding moments between parents and their children, in which parents can foster creativity and impart what they believe to be important lessons — aren’t exactly spaces begging for tech disruption. In fact, this is an area where we probably need less tech, not more.

More on kids and AI: The Proliferation of Deepfakes Is Profoundly Changing the Way Teenagers Use the Internet