Artificial intelligence can create personalized tales with the click of a button. Our Dad’s Dispatch columnist discovers it’s no substitute for the real thing
Nicole Willing and son Miles read a real book at home…without the help of artificial intelligence. Photo Credit Jon Willing
It felt icky the first night I turned storytime over to the robot.
Shelves stuffed with books were within arm’s reach, but here we were tucked into Miles’ bed, feeding data into an artificial intelligence app on my phone to create personalized stories.
But it was just so cool. And, a bit addicting.
Every night turned into a choose your own adventure, but nothing like the classic interactive books. It was a high-tech revamp of the paperbacks.
Each night, we asked the AI robot to behave like a children’s author and write a short, funny story (with chapters, as was requested) featuring Miles and about five of his friends, who each had special powers and interests. The setting was typically parks in our neighbourhood or his school. And then, the twist: we added fictional characters like Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog or the Minions.
The robot spit out silly stories about the friends going on adventures alongside their superhero buddies, with one unexpected addition: there was always a moral or lesson at the end. The robot was actually a big softie, which made the whole experience worthwhile for this father.
Asking the robot to write highly specific stories with names of real people and real places was a bit mind-blowing. Some companies exist solely to personalize hard-copy storybooks for families, charging triple the price of an average book, and here we were, making customized stories at the rate of three per 30 minutes for the cost of an internet connection.
Then it just got out of hand. I found the talk-back function offered by the robot. Now I was both outsourcing both the story and the reading. A cherished storytime ritual turned into another extension of modern-day multimedia entertainment — and unintended screen time.
As we thought about details to feed the robot, we jumped around the internet, searching for new fictional characters to include in the funny stories. We would stop on a page if we found something attention-grabbing, like a photo or video. We became totally distracted from the pre-bedtime routine.
That’s life these days, isn’t it? We have so much technology at our fingertips and so much information available to consume, it’s hard to focus on a small task, like reading. Digital distraction isn’t a phenomenon happening only with kids. How often are us adults picking up our phones to scan messages or read news while watching a movie or sports on the couch?
The robot hasn’t made an appearance at bedtime for several weeks. We quit cold turkey. The truth is, the novelty wore off. Miles stopped asking for the robot stories. We returned to our beloved analog books as we added new ones to our collection, with new characters and page-turning adventures.
If the robot wrote the moral of this story, it might be, “in a world full of screens, the magic of a paper book sparks our imagination in ways no digital tool can.”
-30-