Over on the Daily Adventure blog, Chris has written about the environmental cost of the AI that powers the morning stories. It is worth reading if that question is live for you. The short version is that an AI model generates the story each morning and that generation takes energy. At the scale we operate we are a rounding error in the global AI picture. That does not mean the footprint is zero, and honesty about it is part of using the tool responsibly.
Here is the Story Seeds side of the same question.
The books and games we donate are AI-free. Every book has a human author and a human illustrator, both compensated for what they did, usually with a human editor in between. The creative-writing competitions we run are judged by humans reading children's handwriting. Competition prizes are paid in real cash that children can spend on real things.
We are careful about this because a literacy charity has a specific thing to protect. The value of a book, for a six-year-old, is that a grown-up human spent months or years making it. The story got better because it got refined against other human readers. A child reading a book written and illustrated by a particular human reads what that human meant to say. That matters in a way that a child reading a perfectly serviceable AI-written story does not.
We are not saying AI-written children's books are wrong. Some are fine. We are not interested in fine; we are interested in the book a child picks up at home and notices is different, then takes to school the next day.
Daily Adventure uses AI because the job it does (a fresh story about a specific child, generated overnight) cannot be done any other way. We think the trade-off is honest in that context. The books we donate do not have that constraint, and we do not make the trade-off there.
More there: The environmental cost of AI: an honest conversation