{"slug": "parents-horrified-as-boomer-mawmaws-gift-children-blatant-ai-slop-picture-books", "title": "Parents Horrified as Boomer Mawmaws Gift Children Blatant AI Slop Picture Books", "summary": "Parents across the U.S. are increasingly upset as grandparents gift their grandchildren AI-generated picture books, often created without consent using family photos and names, according to a Wired report. Services like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai facilitate this trend, but parents and children alike find the results underwhelming, and researchers warn about privacy risks and lack of quality compared to human-authored books.", "body_md": "Nothing escapes the sloppifying tentacles of AI. Not even precious parent-child reading time.\n\nAs [ Wired reports](https://www.wired.com/story/boomers-cant-stop-gifting-their-grandkids-ai-generated-slop-books/), moms and dads across the country are having AI-generated children’s books inflicted on them by the tots’ well-meaning grandparents, sometimes creating tensions within the family.\n\nGrandma and grampa think it’s cute to use AI to churn out a picture book with their grandchildren in it. But the parents often aren’t impressed, on top of being horrified by the implications of [their kids being fed into an AI model](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/parents-fury-film-children-ai) in the first place.\n\nOne parent fumed about this scenario in a Reddit post spotted by *Wired*, distraught that their mother wouldn’t take the hint.\n\n“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,” they wrote. “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.'”\n\nAn entire industry has popped up to support — or AI-generate — this niche, *Wired *noted. Multiple services like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai, all offer an easy way to insert kids straight into an imagined AI story.\n\nLike their parents, the kids don’t seem impressed by the AI creations, either. One dad with a seven and three year old kid told *Wired *that the tykes were “bored” by the “personalized” AI-generated books they received from friends and family members.\n\n“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.\n\nFor Daozhi Xu, a researcher at Macquarie University who published an analysis of the “AI children’s book boom,” this isn’t surprising.\n\n“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 told *Wired*.\n\n“Compared with human-authored books,” Xu adds, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”\n\nBrandon Kirman, a comedian and artist, told *Wired *his parents gifted an AI-generated book about the stuff they enjoyed doing with his four and two year old daughter.\n\nIt was “well-meaning on their end, but f**king yikes,” he said, adding that the kids seemed underwhelmed compared to their enthusiasm for other books.\n\nThe most nefarious aspect of this trend, though, is the lack of transparency on how “children’s photos are used and stored on AI platforms,” Xu told *Wired*, “potentially shared with third parties or used to train AI models.”\n\nTry explaining that to mawmaw.\n\n**More on AI:** *AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/parents-horrified-as-boomer-mawmaws-gift-children-blatant-ai-slop-picture-books", "canonical_source": "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/parents-horrified-ai-children-book", "published_at": "2026-08-04 20:49:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-04 20:52:15.955483+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-ethics", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Wired", "Imagitime", "StoryWonderBook", "Childbook.ai", "Daozhi Xu", "Macquarie University", "Brandon Kirman", "Alice Schertle"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/parents-horrified-as-boomer-mawmaws-gift-children-blatant-ai-slop-picture-books", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/parents-horrified-as-boomer-mawmaws-gift-children-blatant-ai-slop-picture-books.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/parents-horrified-as-boomer-mawmaws-gift-children-blatant-ai-slop-picture-books.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/parents-horrified-as-boomer-mawmaws-gift-children-blatant-ai-slop-picture-books.jsonld"}}