Boomers Keep Spoiling Their Grandkids with AI-Created Trashy Reads

Every parent of young kids has a book they dread reading aloud, be it The Rainbow Fish or Goodnight Moon. Recently, however, parents are encountering a new frustration at bedtime: AI-generated nonsense where their own children become unsuspecting stars.

Just three months ago, on an anti-artificial-intelligence subreddit, one user shared a familiar grievance: Against their wishes, their mother was trying to create an AI children’s book about her granddaughter as a birthday gift.

“I have made it clear multiple times that I do not endorse AI-generated art and have set a strict boundary against feeding any of our photos into AI or using our identifying details,” the reddit user explained. “Yet, she is crafting these storylines based on interactions with my child and modeling her characters after my kid, using our family’s first names so she can ‘reflect our family’ and my child will recognize her family.”

For parents who are against artificial intelligence, the odds seem stacked against them, as there’s a whole ecosystem of AI services designed to put real children into stories—platforms like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai—and some relatives are captivated by their promotional material for tailored storybooks.

A 41-year-old father with children aged 7 and 3 in the Midwest told WIRED that both kids have received a “personalized” AI-generated book from friends or family. (He preferred to remain anonymous to avoid upsetting the gift givers.) The books left him unimpressed: “They are so lengthy and verbose that after just one read, my kids were like, ‘Okay, let’s go back to Little Blue Truck,’” he remarked, referring to the well-known children’s series by Alice Schertle.

In comparison to this perennial favorite, he observed that the kids were simply “bored” by the AI output, even if the story was ostensibly about them.

Another father, 40, in Los Angeles, reported that his mother-in-law has given his daughter and son, aged 1 and 3, four lackluster books, including two Mother’s Day-themed tales that are “exactly the same” except for which child is featured. He requested anonymity due to the delicacy of the situation within his family, as his wife “doesn’t want to bring it up” with her mother. Nevertheless, he finds it “morally wrong” to expose kids’ likenesses to “slop machines.”

Daozhi Xu, a fellow at the School of Humanities at Macquarie University, who has researched “the AI children’s book boom,” points out that this kind of personalization does not ensure kids will stay engaged.

“Children don’t enjoy a storybook simply because their name or image is included; they appreciate the book because the story itself is captivating,” Xu stated via email—it’s the “characters, plots, and imaginative settings” that count. “Compared to human-crafted books,” Xu continued, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”

The surge of poor-quality children’s books driven by AI coincides with about 40 percent of fourth-graders in the US reading below the “basic” benchmark established by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as reported in January 2025. Simultaneously, there are troubling signs that parents are becoming less involved in nurturing their kids’ reading habits at home. A survey conducted last year by HarperCollins and data firm Nielsen found that “the number of parents reading aloud to their children is at an all-time low,” and fewer than half of parents with kids aged up to 13 considered it “fun.” Gen Z parents, in particular, are more likely to perceive reading as a chore rather than a source of joy.