Generative AI Storytelling: Amazon Alexa's Bedtime Solution for Children

Known for producing imaginative artwork in response to text prompts, generative AI is now infiltrating one of the most sacred rituals between parents and children: bedtime reading.

With a new Alexa function that generates brief, five-scene tales for youngsters based on a few inputs, Amazon is joining the generative AI trend. The Create with Alexa' function allows kids and adults to pick a character, a descriptive phrase, and a color from pre-set themes including undersea, magical forest, and space exploration. They then wait as the AI creates several narratives, graphics, audio conversations, and background music.

Some experts claim that since Amazon has jumped on the generative AI bandwagon, the corporation has put restrictions in place to make sure that the technology isn't spitting out anything objectionable for young ears. Create with Alexa may also encourage greater interactions between kids and parents. However, AI experts also caution against mystifying children's perceptions of AI's powers and intellect through stories created using generative AI.

The function, which is accessible on Echo Show devices, uses generative AI, or algorithms, which produce new material out of previously existing information. It employs language models specifically, which absorb a lot of material to learn how to construct sentences that sound like humans speak. The Create with Alexa algorithm is honed using a library of publicly accessible images.

According to Amazon's head of product for Alexa AI, Eshan Bhatnagar, Create With Alexa was created with user security in mind. Three security measures are built into the technology: content screening, training the AI on a selected dataset devoid of harmful information, and most significantly, creating a structured and limited experience. According to Bhatnagar, "We wanted to prevent the garbage in garbage out kind of tendency of AI," which refers to the propensity of AI to produce inaccurate material based on the kinds of inputs supplied into it. When it comes to how we want to reveal some of the generative powers to our consumers, "We are being careful and conservative."

According to Stefania Druga, an expert on creative AI at the University of Washington, Amazon's choice to structure Alexa's new storytelling function around a few input prompts that require users to choose from a predetermined set of templates can help make generative AI safer for children.

But even with these measures, Alexa and other intelligent computer systems can have a negative impact on children. Druga discovered that engaging with voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home can affect how children perceive the intelligence of computers in her study article, "Hey Google, is it OK if I eat you? Initial Explorations in Child-Agent Interaction She claims that Create With Alexa might mislead youngsters about the capabilities of AI, affecting their assessments of the machine's true intelligence and its reliability.

What I've observed in my study is that when children begin engaging with voice assistants, they don't even know how to read or write. And if it's their first time searching for anything online, it significantly affects how they interpret information, according to Druga. "It's tougher to build this critical sense of whether they should believe this or not if it's spoken to them with a lovely voice, as a human would say," the author explains. "They don't really perceive that this is just like the top result from a search on the web".

According to Druga, generative AI should be viewed as a tool that can be tinkered with and utilized to further a skill rather than being presented as a mystical and all-knowing technology. In order to accomplish this, it's also crucial to ensure kids comprehend technology and are aware of its inner workings.

Amazon has already experimented with narrative technologies. The business released Magic Door in 2017, an interactive adventure game that lets players choose the course of a tale. The nonlinear experience contains 200 distinct scenes but no AI of any type. Similar to "Create With Alexa," it gives users control over which scenario will appear next by letting them select prompts like settings like woods, oceans, and mystical regions. A coding aid backed by machine learning called CodeWhisperer was also introduced by Amazon earlier this year.

Instead of integrating text and images into a video format as Amazon Alexa has done, these businesses employ machine learning to create fresh text and image content. While Novel AI bills itself as "a GPT-powered sandbox for your imagination," Storywizard AI employs generative AI to produce stories with visuals based on plots that emphasize moral ideas like camaraderie and conquering fear. These other generative AI applications, meanwhile, concentrate on storytelling.

Using generative AI in storytelling can encourage children's imagination and creativity. According to Cortesi, the stories generated by generative AI may encourage users to establish online fanfiction groups and write new stories that expand on the AI's output.