Boomers Can’t Stop Gifting Their Grandkids AI-Generated

What happened

Every parent of young children has a book they’re sick of reading aloud, whether it’s The Rainbow Fish or Goodnight Moon. In recent years, however, moms and dads are facing a fresh misery when it comes to bedtime stories: AI-generated slop in which their own kids are the unwitting stars.

” The AI-fueled explosion of junk children’s books comes as about 40 percent of fourth-graders in the US are reading below the “basic” standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to a report published in January 2025. Meanwhile, there are alarming signs that parents are doing less to foster their kids’ love of reading at home.

A survey last year by publisher HarperCollins and data firm Nielsen found that “the number of parents reading aloud to children is at an all-time low,” and less than half of those with kids aged up to 13 said that it was “fun” for them. Gen Z parents were particularly likely to see reading as work rather than a source of pleasure.

Amid this literacy crisis, books that fail to meet kids’ needs can only make things worse. Brandon Kirkman, an artist and comedian in Chicago, says that his parents presented his 4-year-old daughter with an AI-generated book detailing the activities they enjoy doing with her and her 2-year-old sister.

” Grandparents and relatives who purchase these books “may not realize that age appropriateness is one of the most important criteria for choosing children’s books” that support cognitive and emotional development, she says. The inferior quality of children’s literature spit out by a large language model is not the only concern raised by this trend.

Why it matters

Three months ago, on an anti-artificial-intelligence subreddit, one user vented a now standard complaint: Against their wishes, their mother was attempting to create an AI children’s book about her granddaughter to give the little girl on her birthday.

“I have reiterated countless times that I do not support AI-generated art, and drew a hard line that she is absolutely not to feed any of our photos into AI or use our identifying information in any way,” the redditor wrote. ai—and some relatives can’t resist their ads for specially curated storybooks.

A 41-year-old father of children aged 7 and 3 in the Midwest tells WIRED that both kids have received a “personalized” AI-generated book from a friend or family member.

Compared to this perennial favorite, he notes, the tykes were simply “bored” by what AI had to offer, even if the tale was theoretically about them. Another father, 40, in Los Angeles, says his mother-in-law has gifted his daughter and son, aged 1 and 3, respectively, a total of four slop books, including a pair of Mother’s Day–themed stories that are “exactly the same” apart from which kid is featured.

He requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter within his family, since his wife “doesn’t want to raise the issue” with her mother. ” Daozhi Xu, a fellow in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University who has published an analysis of “the AI children’s book boom,” says that this kind of personalization doesn’t guarantee engagement.

“Children do not love a storybook simply because their name or image appears in the story; they love the book because the story itself is interesting,” Xu explains via email—it’s the “characters, plots, and imaginative worlds” that matter.

What to watch

Xu says another reason it’s “entirely valid” for parents to be put off by these books is the lack of transparency as to how “their children’s photos are used and stored on AI platforms,” and potentially shared with third parties or used to train AI models.

Those questions may account for families feeling more apprehensive about these products than the individualized storybooks of decades past, like the “Me Books” marketed on TV through the 1970s and 1980s. In the style of Mad Libs, that publisher merely plugged personal details into one of several prewritten narratives.