An increasing number of grandparents are gifting AI-generated "personalised" children's books that insert real children as characters, often against their parents' wishes and without consent to use their images or personal details. Platforms such as Imagitime, StoryWonderBook and Childbook.ai market these customised storybooks heavily, but parents interviewed describe them as poorly written and unengaging compared with traditional favourites, raising concerns about both consent and the quality of what children are being read.

Parents told WIRED that despite explicitly objecting to AI-generated content and asking relatives not to use their children's photos or names, family members went ahead anyway, creating books with matching names and personality traits. One father found his children quickly bored with the wordy AI tales, preferring established titles like Little Blue Truck, while another called feeding his children's likenesses into "slop machines" morally reprehensible. An academic, Daozhi Xu of Macquarie University, noted that personalisation alone doesn't create engagement, as AI books often lack the humour and memorable characters of human-authored ones — a concern set against wider data showing about 40% of US fourth-graders read below basic standard, and that fewer parents are reading aloud to their children than ever.