Every parent of Young children have a book that they are tired of reading out loud The rainbow fish or Good night, moon. In recent years, however, moms and dads have been faced with a new plight when it comes to bedtime stories: AI-generated sleazes in which their own children are the unwitting stars.
Three months ago, a user in an anti-artificial intelligence subreddit voiced what has become a common complaint: against his wishes, his mother tried to create an AI children’s book about her granddaughter to give to the little girl for her birthday.
“I have repeated countless times that I do not support AI-generated art and have drawn a clear line that under no circumstances should it feed our photos into the AI or use our identifying information in any way,” the Redditor wrote. “However, she creates these storylines based on my child’s experiences and models her characters to have similar characteristics to my child and us.”[ing] the first names of our family so that they represent us and my child can ‘see the reflection of his family’.”
If the odds are stacked against parents who reject artificial intelligence, it’s because there’s an entire ecosystem of AI services designed to put real children in books—platforms like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai—and some relatives can’t resist their ads for specially curated picture books.
A 41-year-old father of children ages 7 and 3 in the Midwest tells WIRED that both children received a “personalized,” AI-generated book from a friend or family member. (He requested anonymity to avoid offending the gift givers.) The books themselves failed to impress, according to this father: “They’re so long and wordy that after a while each of my kids said, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s read.'” Small blue truck‘,” he says, naming a best-selling children’s series by author Alice Schertle.
Compared to that long-running hit, he notes, guys were just “bored” by what the AI had to offer, even if the story was theoretically about them.
Another father, 40, from Los Angeles, says his mother-in-law gave his daughter and son, ages 1 and 3, respectively, a total of four Slop books, including two Mother’s Day-themed stories that were “exactly the same,” except for which child they were talking about. He requested anonymity because the matter was sensitive within his family as his wife did not want to “bring up the issue with her mother.” Nevertheless, he believes it is “morally reprehensible” to feed children’s images into “slop machines”.
Daozhi Xu, a fellow at Macquarie University’s School of Humanities who published an analysis of the “AI children’s book boom,” says this type of personalization doesn’t guarantee engagement.
“Children don’t just love a picture book because their name or picture appears in the story; they love the book because the story itself is interesting,” Xu explains via email—it’s the “characters, storylines, and imaginative worlds” that matter. “Compared to human-authored books,” Xu adds, AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”
According to a report released in January 2025, about 40 percent of fourth graders in the United States read below the “basic” standard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Meanwhile, there are alarming signs that parents are doing less to encourage their children’s love of reading at home. A survey last year by publisher HarperCollins and data firm Nielsen found that “the number of parents reading to their children is at an all-time low” and fewer than half of those with children aged 13 or younger said they “enjoyed” it. Generation Z parents were particularly likely to view reading as work rather than a source of pleasure.
https://www.wired.com/story/boomers-cant-stop-gifting-their-grandkids-ai-generated-slop-books/
