Show HN: Stories for Kids Using AI | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stories for Kids Using AI

storybee.app

18 pointsniksmac26 comments

Every child deserves a tale that ignites their curiosity, fuels their dreams, and takes them on a journey through the realms of wonder. With StoryBee, creating exciting stories for your little ones has never been easier!

How it Works: https://storybee.app/how-to-generate-stories

Story to Audio: https://storybee.app/ai-story-audio-narration

Why sharing here: To get some constructive feedback from awesome HN community.

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I spent some time with my kid trying to get ChatGPT 4 to write bedtime stories. We found that it kept devolving into the pattern of a generic but acceptable setup followed by something like "and then the heroes solved a variety of challenges, learning together and having fun all the way" that completely skips the meat of the story. We also noticed that it was difficult to goad the AI into adding any quotations; the characters rarely _say_ anything.

We only tried StoryBee once but unfortunately got a very similar result; judge for yourself: https://storybee.app/story/the-purple-mystery-654fbfe43da40f....

We did have fun with ChatGPT getting ideas for specific plot turns and generating illustrations (e.g. https://photos.app.goo.gl/coonT1bT7BLRqXeu8).

Most people can't write a good story from start to finish with no planning, and we have an advantage in that kind of thinking compared to AI. Have you tried starting by having it generate a plot, then once that's finished, expand from there?

Anecdotally, I just asked Bing and it made a quite long story with multiple arcs, action, dialogue, and an ending allegory. Might have just been lucky, really.

We have tried to resolve exactly this problem of "journey skipping". Could you please consider taking a look at our attempt? (it's free), and I'm curious regarding your feedback: https://littlestory.io/en

I like the overall structure of the story and the tilt effect on the logo.

This looks like a fine toy for children who are old enough to type their own prompts and thus well past the basic language acquisition stage where they’re still repeating a lot of what they hear, but I’m absolutely not going to use it to “write” stories for my three year old, and would advise other parents of preschoolers to not use it for anything beyond idea generation - kids that age need to be exposed to their native language as humans speak and write it. 15 minutes of being read the output of a well-prompted LLM is probably better than 15 minutes watching whatever YouTube Kids just threw their way, but it’s 15 minutes not being read a good book.

I would be angry if my child’s preschool was using it to generate stories to read to them instead of taking the trouble to find appropriate books.

There are already more good children’s books in the world than I’d ever have time to read to my child.

What would be amazing: something that took a prompt, then gave you a list of a few extant books that resemble the prompt in some way.

Something like that? https://littlestory.io/en

It wrote a story called the headless horseman that isn't the headless horseman. Seems to suffer from the usual lack of intent that AI art has.

Thanks for the enthusiasm. With all due respect, this experiment is not to solve the problem of AI in general, I am hoping this would help parents/teachers to spend quality time with children.

Do you observe a gap in children's literature that needs to be filled by synthetically generated stories?

Edit, just realized it is a payed service with "third-party advertisers".

Perfect for unengaged parents.

Here are two issues I have experienced that I feel generated content could help with:

1) My wife and I have different native languages, and we want to teach our children both. A big issue we have is that we can only get books in one of those languages where we live, so whenever we travel to see family we always come back with a suitcase full of books, but we have less books than we would like.

2) My children ask "how does this work" and a book would be a great way to teach them. If it's something I don't know we turn to YouTube, but the quality of that is often lacking and not aimed at children (they are under 5). Example: I was asked why cars get holes when they get old.

Thanks for sharing an angle I didn't consider.

Responsibility of parents aside, I think it boils down to awailability vs. quality.

Two analogies capture this tradeoff

* Junk food to food

* Stable diffusion to art

Can it retain any stories so if the kid wants to hear it again later, that's an option?

Yes. You can create an account and you will get all the stories you generated for you forever.

For now take a look at this one if you will. https://storybee.app/story/the-flowing-blue-river-654f92cb3d...

I am not a lawyer, but I would be careful with saying “you will get… forever” on a public forum as a representative of your company. That doesn’t seem to be what your site terms specify:

> As a default, StoryBee and/or its licensors hold the intellectual property rights for all material on StoryBee.

What's the Privacy Policy in non-lawyerly terms ;)

We want to make things as simple as possible for our users to understand not googlish or facebookish :D

Do "you" get them forever too? Like do we have a little buddy in you to help us share knowledge and control over such content?

the whole point of children's stories is to give them some kind of moral or lesson. Unless the kid's really young, in which case it's just to teach them the language. What is machine wordmash going to do besides make brainrot worse?

This variation is more interesting: use Midjourney/OpenAI to generate a sequence of illustrations and let your child come up with the plot for each illustration. My little cousins LOVE creative games like Dixit because they get to write the story, letting their imaginations run wild, and no 2 stories are ever identical (infinite play).

I like it. IMO, that would need more screen time which is not something we want. However this could be a great activity for small kids in school.

Hey we are currently in the MVP stage trying to find product market fit with a similar concept, but more focus on the illustrations: https://heytale.com

One major consideration we had with the pricing was comparing it to other providers. $19/month seems quite steep if you compare it to something like Disney Plus.

FYI List of some (likely not all) competitors in this space: https://topai.tools/s/Children's-story-generator https://theresanaiforthat.com/story-writing/

Nice :D

It seems you have good intentions with this system and want to do something positive for children, but I am currently listening to this podcast. I think it would be wise to explicitly distance yourself from the scams around AI children's books: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-ai-is-com...

You also can try GPTs for that https://chat.openai.com/g/g-BzG1PgnHf-bedtime-stories-maker

Do parents print these out? I feel like using devices near bed time with kids is a bad idea

We have plans to launch this as a free downloadable pdf every week/month and option to purchase a printed version if interested

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