Meta is developing a new AI-powered storytelling app called StoryKit, designed to generate children's stories complete with custom characters, settings, life lessons, and background music. According to the App Store listing, the app promises parents that "You don’t need to write a single word."

It seems a tech company has finally found a way to automate one of humanity's oldest traditions: using our imagination. StoryKit was first noticed in the App Store by 9to5Mac. A Meta spokesperson described it as a creative tool for crafting personalized, imaginative storybooks for children, adding that the app includes AI safety filters, no social features, and is restricted to users aged 18 and older. To create a story, users start by selecting a character—which they can bring to life by "[snapping] a photo of their favorite toy or person," as the App Store description explains. Then, they describe the story's world and choose a lesson, allowing them to "weave in values like kindness, courage, or empathy without it feeling like a lecture."

The silver lining here is that StoryKit could have been far worse. Meta has a track record of releasing misguided ideas, such as Instagram deepfake generators and what some have called "pervert glasses." In comparison, is it truly so harmful to subject children to soulless bedtime stories? Perhaps we shouldn't expect more from the company that once promised a utopian vision of virtual reality work meetings. Humans have their flaws, but if there's one thing we excel at, it's creating stories. We've been telling tales since the dawn of our existence. We don't even need to invent original stories about fairy princesses or dragon slayers—we've always drawn from mythology, fables, and other narratives. The summer's blockbuster movie is essentially an ancient myth rooted in that same oral tradition.

Parents lead exhausting, busy lives, but it has always been possible to get through bedtime without relying on an inherently uncreative technology that calculates the most predictable response to a prompt. You can see the temptation: when your child rejects the bookshelf full of children's books and demands an improvised intergalactic adventure about a turtle and a hedgehog who are best friends solving space mysteries, it's easy to pull up StoryKit. But do we really want to surrender those moments of whimsy and silliness, outsourcing connection to reading AI-generated scripts from our smartphones? Perhaps the real lesson 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.