Every parent of young children has a book they’re sick of reading aloud, whether it’s The Rainbow Fish or Goodnight Moon. In recent years, however, moms and dads are facing a fresh misery when it comes to bedtime stories: AI-generated slop in which their own kids are the unwitting stars.
Three months ago, on an anti-artificial-intelligence subreddit, one user vented a now standard complaint: Against their wishes, their mother was attempting to create an AI children’s book about her granddaughter to give the little girl on her birthday.
“I have reiterated countless times that I do not support AI-generated art, and drew a hard line that she is absolutely not to feed any of our photos into AI or use our identifying information in any way,” the redditor wrote. “However, she is creating these storylines based on experiences with my kid and modeling her characters to have similar attributes as my kid, and us[ing] our family’s first names so that they represent us and my kid will ‘see her family reflected.’”
If the odds are against parents who disapprove of artificial intelligence, it’s because there’s an entire ecosystem of AI services designed to insert real children into books—platforms such as Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai—and some relatives can’t resist their ads for specially curated storybooks.
A 41-year-old father of children aged 7 and 3 in the Midwest tells WIRED that both kids have 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 dad: “They are so long and wordy that, after one time through, each of my kids was like, ‘Yeah, OK, let’s read Little Blue Truck,’” he says, naming a best-selling children’s series by author Alice Schertle.
Compared to this perennial favorite, he notes, the tykes were simply “bored” by what AI had to offer, even if the tale was theoretically about them.
Another father, 40, in Los Angeles, says his mother-in-law has gifted his daughter and son, aged 1 and 3, respectively, a total of four slop books, including a pair of Mother’s Day–themed stories that are “exactly the same” apart from which kid is featured. He requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter within his family, since his wife “doesn’t want to raise the issue” with her mother. Still, he considers it “morally reprehensible” to feed kids’ likenesses into “slop machines.”
Daozhi Xu, a fellow in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University who has published an analysis of “the AI children’s book boom,” says that this kind of personalization doesn’t guarantee engagement.
“Children do not love a storybook simply because their name or image appears in the story; they love the book because the story itself is interesting,” Xu explains via email—it’s the “characters, plots, and imaginative worlds” that matter. “Compared with human-authored books,” Xu adds, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”
The AI-fueled explosion of junk children’s books comes as about 40 percent of fourth-graders in the US are reading below the “basic” standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to a report published in January 2025. Meanwhile, there are alarming signs that parents are doing less to foster their kids’ love of reading at home. A survey last year by publisher HarperCollins and data firm Nielsen found that “the number of parents reading aloud to children is at an all-time low,” and less than half of those with kids aged up to 13 said that it was “fun” for them. Gen Z parents were particularly likely to see reading as work rather than a source of pleasure.
