On August 5, amid the controversy around Google’s introduction of Gemini, a chatbot aimed at children and accessible by default on Google apps, the company launched Gemini Storybook, an app offering personalized stories with read-aloud narration as an option. After the user has supplied a chatbot with parameters for the desired story and art style (or personal images), Storybook needs only a few seconds to create a 10-page digital storybook in any of its 45 language options.
According to a company release, the app’s books can help children to “understand a complex topic” such as the solar system, teach lessons about values such as kindness through characters that reflect the child’s interests (such as animals), bring a child’s own artwork to life, or turn family memories into a custom storybook. In the example story offered by Google with the release, a mother uploads her resume to the app so that her daughters can understand what she does for a living through a custom story featuring her at work.
So far, the app has met with mixed response. Sarah Dooley, a consultant who offers courses and consulting to parents through her business AI-Empowered Mom, is a fan of the product. “When Gemini’s new Storybook feature came out, the timing was perfect for back-to-school at our house,” she told PW. “I have twin daughters starting kindergarten and I wanted a story about twins beginning school with their big sister to show them the way. I wrote a simple prompt and Gemini created the sweetest storybook about squirrel sisters starting school together. Sharing it with my girls opened up a conversation about their nerves.”
However, a number of other users have voiced concerns, including Laura Holmes, former Google product manager and founder of Wanderly, an interactive storytelling app. On her blog runningtowards.xyz, Holmes recounted her experience with the app, reporting that multiple inappropriate images containing nudity were generated by her prompts for stories featuring mermaids and aliens, and that the app made assumptions about a child’s appearance, defaulting to fair-skinned children unless specifically instructed otherwise. (Other users have mentioned incorrect numbers of limbs on characters featured in stories, and in PW’s own test, the children depicted had issues such as having their heads on backward.)
Of greater concern to Holmes, though, is the app’s “uninformed and potentially harmful” approach to child development. “If someone on my team had presented this storybook product to me, I would have said a couple of things: Do not launch it until you’ve had it reviewed by a diverse group of parents and early childhood experts and had a chance to incorporate their feedback,” she said. “If Google cared about this market, they would have thought about these problems before the launch.”
Tech journalist Jospeh Foley shared some similar reactions about the quality of Storybook’s stories in his review of the app on Creative Bloq, a site covering innovations in art and design. Foley described the app’s instant stories as “fairly flat and soulless” with “impersonal” characters and “trite, formulaic” language. He also pointed out problems with consistency: characters sometimes looked different from scene to scene or disappeared without explanation. In terms of safety, he posited, “Would you risk giving a kid an AI-generated story when you don’t know what hallucination the model might come up with?”
More importantly though, Foley said, Storybook misses the point of bedtime reading, and he offers a tongue-in-cheek description of the app as “another creative AI tool to save us time and effort and to protect us from the ordeal of having to interact with children.” The product, in his view, “seems to see [reading] as a chore that needs to be dealt with as quickly as possible” and “something that needs to be customized to each child with the sole purpose of teaching life lessons,” overlooking the value of parent-child bonding and reading as an important part of a child’s social-emotional development. “Part of the fun of bedtime reading for kids is discovering books with unexpected stories or art styles that capture their imaginations,” he said, adding that stories that make kids “the star of every story they read or watch,” might lead toward “an atomized culture devoid of shared experiences.”
Martha Brockenbrough, author of books for both children and adults and advocate for authors’ rights, sees Gemini Storybook as “a profit-seeker in search of a problem to solve.” She told PW, “The world has many children’s books that are available for free at taxpayer-funded libraries. These books are created by human beings over time, and at every step, with the wellbeing of the child in mind.” On the other hand, she said, the stories generated by this app in particular are “like serving them powdered orange juice made in an unregulated factory and feeling good about it.” She stressed that children “deserve human-made art as much as they deserve whole food” and believes this product and others like it “will result in children being fed lesser work at a time when their developing minds need the best we can give them.”
That view is shared by Sarah Baker, executive director of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. In addition to her having misgivings about the quality of the instant stories and their “disregard for everything we know about child development,” she said, the app “gives neither credit nor compensation to the humans who made the work it trained on, which was essentially stolen.” More “frightening and dystopian,” she continued, is “the concurrence of its launch with a simultaneous national project to defund public education and ban books. I can’t say denying young people their rightful access to literature, information, and education while thrusting soulless, machine-generated ‘content’ on them is a good thing, or the best way to build a society.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment. In defense of the app, online commenters state that it is still in an exploratory phase, although it is not presented that way in the company’s release. Baker stated that “even if the app is labeled an ‘experiment,’ children aren’t AI guinea pigs.” She added that SCBWI supports the Authors Guild’s efforts to protect the rights and property of authors and illustrators, and she hopes that publishers, creators, teachers, parents, and caregivers will push back on the exploitation of authors and illustrators’ work.
Upon the release of the Gemini chatbot, a coalition of groups including the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Fairplay, filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, stating that the product violates federal privacy law and demanding its withdrawal. In a statement, Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, called “Gemini and other AI bots... a serious threat to children’s mental health and social development.”
Baker conceded that a product like Gemini Storybook might be useful for some families “if and when generative AI becomes ethical technology.” She added that “no matter how advanced the technology gets, our children will always deserve high quality books written, illustrated, edited, art-directed, and/or spoken aloud by human beings. And they need unfettered access to all of those books in libraries, too.”
“Storytelling and art are human birthrights,” Brockenbrough said. “We have been doing this longer than we have had tools for writing and reproducing narrative.”
