AI-generated personalized children's books given as gifts spark disputes between parents and grandparents
Grandparents in the USA are giving children personalized books from AI tools such as Imagitime or Childbook.ai. Parents criticize the low quality of the texts and unclear handling of children's photos, while a researcher at Macquarie University confirms their lower quality compared with traditional books.
According to a report by Wired, grandparents and other relatives in the USA are increasingly giving children personalized books created using AI tools such as Imagitime, StoryWonderBook or Childbook.ai, which incorporate a particular child's name, likeness and personal circumstances into the story. Several parents interviewed describe receiving the gift despite explicitly objecting to the use of photos or personal data of their children, and say that the books failed to interest the children – compared with popular traditional titles such as Little Blue Truck, one child called them boring.
Daozhi Xu, a researcher at Macquarie University who studies AI children's books, says that simply inserting a child's name or likeness into a story does not guarantee their interest – children come to love books because of interesting characters, plots and suspense, which she says AI-generated books often lack compared with books written by humans. Her research also finds technical shortcomings in these books, such as spelling errors, disjointed stories or mismatches between text and illustrations.
The trend is unfolding against a backdrop of declining reading proficiency in the USA – according to a National Assessment of Educational Progress report from January 2025, approximately 40 % of fourth graders read below the basic level, and according to a survey by publisher HarperCollins and company Nielsen, fewer parents are reading aloud to their children, with less than half of parents of children under 13 seeing this reading as fun.
Parents and researcher Xu also mention uncertainty about how platforms handle uploaded photographs of children – whether they share them with third parties or use them to train AI models. In a response to Wired, Imagitime stated that it does not share data with unauthorized third parties or use it for promotion or AI training, and that its books are edited not only by AI but also by a team of human authors and illustrators. StoryWonderBook and Childbook.ai did not respond to requests for comment. You can find details in the source article.
Why it matters
For families, this is a concrete clash between a well-intentioned gift and concerns about the privacy of children's data and the quality of the content they present to children – without clear information about how platforms actually handle photographs of minors, parents must make decisions in the dark. For companies in this segment, it means growing pressure for transparency in processing children's data, which could affect customer trust and future regulation of similar services.
Two audiences, two different impacts
What this means
For individuals
Parents who object to uploading photos and names of their children to AI tools face situations in which grandparents or other relatives give them such books without their consent, and must address both the privacy of children's data and the low quality of these books and children's limited interest in them compared with traditional literature.
For a business
Companies offering personalized AI books for children (e.g. Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, Childbook.ai) face growing scrutiny over transparency in handling photographs and data of minors, as well as the quality of generated content, creating reputational and compliance risks in the children's literature and consumer AI products sectors.
Risks and complianceCheck the original
Event sources
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