# Boomers Can’t Stop Gifting Their Grandkids AI-Generated Slop Books > Source: > Published: 2026-07-29 09:30:00+00:00 Every parent of young children has a [book](https://www.wired.com/category/culture/books/) 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](https://www.wired.com/story/scammy-ai-generated-books-flooding-amazon/) in which their own kids are the unwitting stars. 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](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1t5zg2p/grandma_making_ai_picture_book_for_granddaughter/). “However, she is creating these storylines based on experiences with my kid and modeling her characters to have similar attributes as my kid, and us[ing] our family’s first names so that they represent us and my kid will ‘see her family reflected.’” If the odds are against parents who disapprove of artificial intelligence, it’s because there’s an entire ecosystem of AI services designed to insert real children into books—platforms such as [Imagitime](https://imagitime.com/), [StoryWonderBook](https://www.storywonderbook.com/), and Childbook.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. (He requested anonymity to avoid offending the gift givers.) The books themselves failed to impress, according to this dad: “They are so long and wordy that, after one time through, each of my kids was like, ‘Yeah, OK, let’s read *Little Blue Truck*,’” he says, naming a best-selling children’s series by author Alice Schertle. 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. Still, he considers it “morally reprehensible” to feed kids’ likenesses into “slop machines.” Daozhi Xu, a fellow in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University who has published an [analysis](https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/2026/may-2026/ai-and-children-books) 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. “Compared with human-authored books,” Xu adds, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.” The AI-fueled explosion of junk children’s books comes as about [40 percent](https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nations-report-card-decline-in-reading-progress-in-math.html) of fourth-graders in the US are [reading below the “basic” standard](https://www.wired.com/story/mississippi-state-testing-reading-comprehension-literacy/) 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](https://corporate.harpercollins.co.uk/press-releases/new-research-reveals-that-parents-are-losing-the-love-of-reading-aloud/) 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. It was “well-meaning on their end, but fucking yikes,” he says, adding that the kids’ interest in the tale “did not hold up compared to any other books they like for us to read to them.” Xu says her research shows that the technical shortcomings of AI-generated children’s books (spelling mistakes, incoherent narratives, mismatches between images and text) mean they “struggle to deliver the qualities that make them both educationally valuable and entertaining.” 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. 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teJb-KXmbKo)” 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. Neither StoryWonderBook nor Childbook.ai returned a request for comment. In a statement to WIRED, Imagitime said that it employs “several security measures” to ensure the safety of user data, which “is neither shared with unauthorized third parties” nor used “for any promotional purposes or for any AI training.” The publisher’s statement also said that its books are “not simply AI-generated” but edited in part by “a creative team of writers and illustrators.” In addition to books featuring kids, some parents have complained of being [fleeced](https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1i4mj0o/beware_of_aigenerated_picture_books_for_kids/) by vendors selling AI-produced books not labeled as such on Amazon, irritated by their children’s exposure to puzzles and games riddled with AI’s [mistakes](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1svbf1e/unsolvable_ai_slop_the_grandparents_gave_my_kid/), and just plain dismayed by the proliferation of the AI [aesthetic](https://www.reddit.com/r/childrensbooks/comments/1rinbje/maybe_im_oldfashioned_but_aigenerated_kids_books/) across content targeted at kids. And that’s to say nothing of the threat to actual children’s authors. While some of these books are expensive—$54.99 for a hardcover from Imagitime, for example—StoryWonderBook and Childbook.ai are both built on cheaper subscription models. The former offers a $14.99 monthly plan that allows the generation of up to 20 stories per month, including “full audio narration” and an online story gallery; the latter has a $24 monthly premium plan with enough credits to create 50 books a month, with one printed book delivered in that period. Compared to the labor-intensive process of publishing a children’s book written and illustrated by humans, these are inexpensive, efficient tools for churning out AI-assisted books on a virtual assembly line. That means there’s more at stake than embarrassing gifts for toddlers (and sometimes [adolescents](https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1sst441/my_mom_got_me_this_as_a_present_for_christmas/) and even [adults](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1py5niv/family_friends_got_my_mother_an_entirely_ai/)). The children’s book market has been [flooded with this stuff](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/ai-childrens-books/), and influencers have pitched it as an [easy side hustle](https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/tech/ai/chatgpt-writter-childrens-books-side-hustle/). Sadly, that claim is no doubt fueled by the misguided assumption that kids won’t recognize or care about the difference between a carefully crafted, engaging book and low-effort, derivative gibberish. The good news is, that doesn’t seem to be the case—and parents are pushing back.