Every parent of young children has a book they’re sick of reading aloud, whether it’s The Rainbow Fish or Goodnight Moon. 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. 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. Daozhi Xu, a fellow in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University who has published an analysis of “the AI children’s book boom,” says that this kind of personalization doesn’t guarantee engagement. “Compared with human-authored books,” Xu adds, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”