Daily Adventure, the morning-alarm project we run, uses AI to write a short story for a child every night. The books Story Seeds donates to schools do not. Both choices are deliberate and the reasoning is different for each.
The Daily Adventure case is easier. The whole point of the product is that the story mentions your child's name, today's weather where you live, tomorrow's football practice, the cousin's birthday that is three days away. Pre-recording "good morning" in every possible combination is impossible. Personalisation at that depth, generated fresh overnight, can only be done with a tool that writes on demand. If the alternative is that a real author sits down every evening and writes three hundred stories by hand, we cannot afford it and neither can the families.
The books case is different. When we send a class set to a Reception, we are buying books written by a real author who made them for real children. The writing went through an editor. The illustrations took a human months, and the book has been in real classrooms long enough for us to know whether it works. None of it is guessing.
What would be strange, in a way that took us a while to articulate, is if we used AI to write those same books. A story on a bedroom wall is three minutes long and then gone. A book a child returns to for years is a different kind of object. The labour that makes a book last is labour we want to pay real authors and illustrators for, and cash sponsorship to Story Seeds goes directly into their pockets.
Daily Adventure's AI use is limited to what only AI can do. The voice actors whose voices are synthesised are on ElevenLabs' licensed programme and compensated for their voice. The rest of the system is not generated. News content is curated by hand from BBC Newsround, and the story frameworks the AI fills in were written by us over most of last year.
More there: We use AI + humans (and here's why)