A World Without Imagination

Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKit, which generates children's stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. As the App Store listing assures parents, "You don't need to write a single word."¹

At last, a tech company has found a way to outsource humanity's oldest pastime: using our imaginations. StoryKit was first spotted in the App Store by 9to5Mac. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is piloting StoryKit in select countries to see how parents like it.

A Creative Gap

To generate a story in the app, you first select a character, which you can create by snapping a photo of their favorite toy or person to bring them to life. Then, you describe the world of your story and choose a lesson, so that you can weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture. This process may seem appealing, but it raises questions about the role of technology in children's creative development.

The Limitations of AI-Generated Storytelling

Humans have their faults, but if we're good at anything, it's making stuff up. We've been telling stories for as long as we've existed. We don't even have to spin up original tales of fairy princesses and dragon slayers, but can draw from mythology, fables, and other stories. Parents lead exhausting, busy lives, but it has always been possible to survive bedtime without using an inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt.

A World of Whimsy and Silliness

You could see how it might be tempting to pull up StoryKit when your kid rejects your bookcase full of children's books and demands that you improvise an intergalactic tale about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends and solve space mysteries. But do we really want to reject a chance at whimsy and silliness and instead outsource these moments of connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones?

The Power to Choose

Perhaps the moral of the story here is that we can choose not to live in a world where children are raised on bedtime stories written by large language models. Meta's vision of the future may be antisocial and bleak, but we have the power to reject that reality. We can choose to preserve the creative bond between parents and children, and to keep imagination alive in a world of screens and algorithms.

Footnotes

1. Meta's AI storytelling app, StoryKit, generates children's stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music. ↩