Artificial intelligence is like a squid trying to squeeze itself through a keyhole. It’ll take the shape of whatever it thinks you think will make it useful. A trending example of this is the current drive into children’s storytelling. Meta recently debuted StoryKit, an AI platform that will stick your kids into their own stories.
You’ll have to hand over information about your offspring for this function to work. Sure, you could lie about what little Johnny and Susan are really like, but then you’d have to use your own imagination instead of letting a computer think for you. It’s far more convenient to give Meta the everyday details of your children’s lives, their names, appearances, and other info. It’s not like Meta makes its main living by collecting as much identifying information about every human it comes into contact with. Oh, wait.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company isn’t alone. Google has just dropped a similar ‘feature’ for its Google Home devices called Interactive Storytime. “You and your family can now co-create custom adventures on the fly, interrupt the narrative to change the plot mid-scene, or remix classic fairy tales together in real-time,” the company explains. The company’s data collection is presented less overtly than StoryKit. Even so, it still offers the option to “tell us a story where my kids, David and Ava, travel to Mars.”
Highly artificial intelligence
cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night:
connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests.
every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 31, 2026
As tone-deaf and silly as these entries from Meta and Google are (Amazon isn’t exempt, either), they pale next to the bone-headedness of OpenAI head Sam Altman. The tech CEO last month suggested, apparently seriously, using AI to communicate more effectively with one’s kids. If you can’t see the problem with the suggestion immediately, you may need recalibration.
Customised bedtime stories have been around for ages. Far longer than Amazon’s Alexa taking a whack at generative AI storytelling in 2023. It used to rely on human intelligence and a functioning imagination, something that’s apparently in short supply a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Inventing stories, even (or especially) bad ones, has characterised the human species going back as far as we’re able to track. It’s how we’ve passed information on. Historically. For all of recorded history.
Call me a luddite if you like, but it’s a bad idea to outsource one of the most critical functions of being human — telling stories to other humans — to a computer. It’s far too soon for comprehensive studies on the subject, but five minutes of thought will point out what’s being lost in just this interaction.
You weren’t using that hippocampus anyway
Let’s examine this from the perspective of a parent. Instead of remembering what your kids have been up to, possibly talking to them beforehand to find out, you could follow Sam Altman’s advice (or whichever weasel actually gave him that awful idea) and reduce these human beings to datapoints. Feed that into an LLM and artificial intelligence will strip you of any need to use your imagination. It’s not like that’s closely tied to your memory functions or anything.
If a storyteller can’t make up stories or remember basic facts, artificial intelligence becomes an effective stopgap to manage what is essentially mental decline. Unfortunately, the studies that do exist suggest that continued reliance will just exacerbate the problem. That’s great… if you’re one of the AI companies trying to ram through artificial intelligence in everything. It’s less great if you’re highly dependent on a technology that’s one gigantic solar flare away from not existing any more.
What prefrontal cortex problems?
From the perspective of a listener, in this case a child, there are several drawbacks. The main reason a parent will turn on an AI story is that they don’t have the time or inclination to do the work themselves. For a small child, the results can be devastating. Sure, the AI story might be entertaining and engaging. It’s also likely to be slop. In a worst case, the AI could start channelling Thomas Harris or Chuck Tingle or Stephenie Meyer or something. The psychological damage would be awful.
There’s also the lack of… passing on might be a good term. The verbal transmission of information from one human being to another. That’s a skill that has been in decline since the advent of the telephone (greatly accelerated by the internet and cellular phone). Now, people experience anxiety performing an action that has characterised a great majority of human interaction.
If you’re fine with starting your toddler on that path about a decade sooner than they otherwise would, that’s up to you. It’ll still make you a bad parent, though.
Never mind. If you ask Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever Meta has, or whichever other LLM you hand money to, I’m sure they’ll tell you that you (and they) are correct and I’m wrong about this. Pay no attention to the hole you’ll be engraving in your kid’s souls by letting Meta, Google, or ChatGPT take over your parenting. I’m sure it’ll all work out fine.
