I was shocked: my husband was using AI to write our children’s bedtime stories
The other night, from the hallway outside my second-grader’s bedroom, I heard her ask my husband for a very specific bedtime story – so specific I could have sworn she was choosing prompts just to screw with him. She wanted one that was about “mowing lawns in a place called Bananaland, and a festival, and monkeys, but make it funny”.
G’luck, I thought, as I started to tiptoe away, having completed my readaloud portion from The Swiss Family Robinson, which we’re making our way through together each night.
I stuck around to hear him be eaten alive. But then he cleared his throat and began.
There was a protagonist, a “clever and adventurous girl, who was not your typical Bananaland resident”. There was a lawnmower, named the Banana Blade, that featured prominently. There were aromas of fresh-cut banana leaves, and mischievous monkeys, who threw banana peels into her path. By the time he got to the riddle the adventurous girl needed to solve, delivered in rhythm and rhyme, my entire world order had heaved on its axis.
He works in venture capital. I’m the writer. And all I have the bandwidth to do at the end of the day is read aloud to her from books other creative people have written, even if their plots feature a “good little mother” who spends her days cheerfully whipping up delicious meals of roasted penguin and being praised for her frugality and Christian values.
To not only come up with a brandnew story, but also add a rhyming riddle into the mix? Just whom had I married?
I started to cycle through the stories of other women who’d also found themselves living with men who harbored deep secrets, from Rosemary’s Baby to Jane Eyre. Was he communing with the devil? Did he have a first wife hidden in the coat closet?
“It’s ChatGPT,” he whispered, with a shrug, after he tiptoed out and found me slack-jawed and panicky. “I just feed in her insane prompts and it spits out a story.”
Oh.
My panic then took a left turn. He wasn’t communing with the devil, exactly, just a robot – but in my profession, the one in which I string together words for a living, the line between artificial intelligence and Satan gets fuzzy. Another thought nagged at me: was this yet another product of a consumerist culture that promises instant gratification to children, who can be heard yelping up at their parents from strollers all over the world: “Just go to Amazon and buy it”?
While I fondly remember the serialized stories my father used to tell me at bedtime, often featuring a wisecracking pigeon name Lou (“I’m walkin’ here!” he’d squawk as taxis swerved to avoid hitting him), I long ago gave up the idea that I could tap into some creative fount at bedtime.
It’s a combination of world events, the obligations of a busy life with three little kids, and the relentless stream of illness that comes along with that – we just recovered from a month-long period in which our household boasted three RSV infections, two strep throats, one case of croup, one ear infection and one pneumonia diagnosis (that one was mine). Like the homemade threecourse meals that pop up on my Instagram feed, shot by the Parisian mothers who’ve somehow infiltrated my stream, spinning yarns for a rapt audience is a goal to strive towards. This means that the preschooler, who’s going through a Mommy phase and only wants me to put her to bed, hasn’t been told an onthe-spot story in ages.
“Oh yeah, we do robot stories,” one friend told me when I started asking around. “For sure,” said another. “I just plug in prompts with the kids’ names in them.” Heading online, I found that articlesaboundedexalting the welcome assist of having personalized bedtime stories at the fingertips of even the most tapped-out parent (including Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, who is apparently a fan).
A few years before AI started to dominate the headlines, I published a book that investigated the intersection of parenting and technology, and came to the conclusion that despite various marketers’ claims to the contrary, tech by and large only serves to transfer a parent’s focus from their own child to a device. Its promise is to “hack” a moment, make it more efficient – but rarely is that the right goal for parents, who shouldn’t be trying to optimize moments with their children, just doing their best to be present, without a scrim of blue light in between. I wondered: could the introduction of AI change that?
The next morning, having checked the closets for wives, I ventured over to ChatGPT and started feeding it some prompts.
“Tell me a story in the style of Goodnight Moon about trucks” (for the twoyear-old).
“Have the characters of Swiss Family Robinson visit New York City” (for the second-grader).
“Tell me a short bedtime story for a four-year-old who likes Frozen, and make it funny” (for the preschooler).
I quickly realized that anything AIgenerated for the two-year-old was missing the point. His experience of Goodnight Moon has more to do with curling up in my lap and looking at its comforting illustrations than it does to do with the prose itself, sleeping trucks in the garage be damned.
ChatGPT wildly bungled the Swiss Family Robinson prompt, even as I continually refined it, plopping the characters in Times Square, where, in a sequence that would make Johann David Wyss roll over in his grave, they “danced whimsically in the glow of neon signs and laughed under the twinkling lights, creating memories that would last a lifetime” (right up there