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Show HN: Stories for Kids Using AI

by niksmac on 11/11/23, 9:09 AM with 26 comments

• by jtbarrett on 11/11/23, 6:43 PM

  I spent some time with my kid trying to get ChatGPT 4 to write bedtime stories. We found that it kept devolving into the pattern of a generic but acceptable setup followed by something like "and then the heroes solved a variety of challenges, learning together and having fun all the way" that completely skips the meat of the story. We also noticed that it was difficult to goad the AI into adding any quotations; the characters rarely _say_ anything.

  We only tried StoryBee once but unfortunately got a very similar result; judge for yourself: https://storybee.app/story/the-purple-mystery-654fbfe43da40f....

  We did have fun with ChatGPT getting ideas for specific plot turns and generating illustrations (e.g. https://photos.app.goo.gl/coonT1bT7BLRqXeu8).

• by MandieD on 11/11/23, 6:33 PM

  This looks like a fine toy for children who are old enough to type their own prompts and thus well past the basic language acquisition stage where they’re still repeating a lot of what they hear, but I’m absolutely not going to use it to “write” stories for my three year old, and would advise other parents of preschoolers to not use it for anything beyond idea generation - kids that age need to be exposed to their native language as humans speak and write it. 15 minutes of being read the output of a well-prompted LLM is probably better than 15 minutes watching whatever YouTube Kids just threw their way, but it’s 15 minutes not being read a good book.

  I would be angry if my child’s preschool was using it to generate stories to read to them instead of taking the trouble to find appropriate books.

  There are already more good children’s books in the world than I’d ever have time to read to my child.

  What would be amazing: something that took a prompt, then gave you a list of a few extant books that resemble the prompt in some way.

• by Indoctus on 11/11/23, 9:21 AM

  It wrote a story called the headless horseman that isn't the headless horseman. Seems to suffer from the usual lack of intent that AI art has.

• by blotato on 11/11/23, 6:50 PM

  This variation is more interesting: use Midjourney/OpenAI to generate a sequence of illustrations and let your child come up with the plot for each illustration. My little cousins LOVE creative games like Dixit because they get to write the story, letting their imaginations run wild, and no 2 stories are ever identical (infinite play).

• by lukeda on 11/11/23, 8:14 PM

  Hey we are currently in the MVP stage trying to find product market fit with a similar concept, but more focus on the illustrations: https://heytale.com

  One major consideration we had with the pricing was comparing it to other providers. $19/month seems quite steep if you compare it to something like Disney Plus.

  FYI List of some (likely not all) competitors in this space: https://topai.tools/s/Children's-story-generator https://theresanaiforthat.com/story-writing/

• by disconnection on 11/14/23, 10:12 AM

  It seems you have good intentions with this system and want to do something positive for children, but I am currently listening to this podcast. I think it would be wise to explicitly distance yourself from the scams around AI children's books: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-ai-is-com...

• by shirman on 11/12/23, 3:22 AM

  You also can try GPTs for that https://chat.openai.com/g/g-BzG1PgnHf-bedtime-stories-maker

• by gardenhedge on 11/12/23, 11:02 AM

  Do parents print these out? I feel like using devices near bed time with kids is a bad idea