Meta is testing an AI bedtime story app for people with no imagination

Meta推出了一款名为StoryKit的AI应用，专为“没想象力”的睡前故事时间设计。你只需拍下孩子的玩具或家人照片，AI就能自动生成一个包含角色、场景、寓意甚至背景音乐的原创童话故事，全程不需要你自己写一个字。说白了，这就是一个AI讲故事生成器，家长连编故事的大脑都不用动，手指点几下就能搞定。目前Meta正在部分国家测试这款应用，仅限18岁以上用户使用，并且加入了安全过滤，没有社交功能。这听起来挺省事，但问题是，睡前故事原本是家长和孩子即兴发挥、放飞想象的亲密时光。用AI生成千篇一律的脚本，等于把人类最古老的创造性活动外包给了机器。对孩子来说，他们可能失去的不仅是父母随口胡诌的荒诞乐趣，更是被“正确答案”框住的想象力。以后哄睡或许更省力了，但那些只有爸爸妈妈才能编出的、有点傻气却独一无二的宇宙冒险，可能就再也听不到了。

Meta is working on an AI storytelling app called StoryKit, which creates AI-generated 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.” 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 Meta spokesperson described StoryKit as a creative storytelling app used to craft personalized, imaginative storybooks for children and noted that it uses AI safety filters with no social features and is only available to users over the age of 18. 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,” according to the description in the App Store. 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.” Image Credits:StoryKit (opens in a new window) The good news about StoryKit is that it could be a lot worse. Meta regularly ships boneheaded ideas like Instagram deepfake generators and “pervert glasses.” Comparatively, is it so bad to doom children to soulless bedtime stories? Should we have expected anything better from the company that promised us a utopian world of virtual reality work meetings? 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. We have always drawn from mythology, fables, and other stories — the blockbuster movie of the summer is literally an ancient myth that originated from this same tradition of oral storytelling. 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. var playerInstance_jwplayer_6a601764c6eab = jwplayer( "jwplayer_6a601764c6eab" ); playerInstance_jwplayer_6a601764c6eab.setup({ playlist: "https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/DxHIIVx3", }); 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? 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.