Boomers Can’t Stop Gifting Their Grandkids AI-Generated Slop Books
Parents are getting fed up with garbled bedtime stories that feature characters based on actual photos of their children.
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Older relatives are giving AI-generated personalized children's books as gifts, a trend that frustrates parents who worry about their children's photos being fed into AI systems and stored without clear transparency. The books themselves tend to disappoint kids because they lack the engaging storytelling, humor, and memorable characters that make human-authored books appealing, according to researchers who study AI in children's literature. This matters because reading proficiency among children is already declining, parents are reading aloud to kids less often than ever before, and the proliferation of low-quality AI books could worsen an existing literacy crisis. Parents also express concerns about how their children's data is used, stored, and potentially shared by these AI platforms, and worry about the impact on professional children's authors as inexpensive AI tools make it easier to mass-produce books at scale.
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