The AI Wrote My Daughter's Bedtime Story. She Asked for It by Name

I used to make up her stories. Now she asks for the one the app makes, the one that knows her name and her favorite color and the dragon's name she invented. It is a good story. That is the problem.

The app writes personalized bedtime stories. It asked for her name, her age, her favorite color, her fears, and the name of the dragon she invented last summer. It built her a story about a girl named Maya who befriends a dragon named Golu and saves the kingdom with her favorite color, turquoise.

She loves it. She asks for it by name. She corrects me when I get Golu's scales wrong, because the app remembered that they are turquoise, and I had forgotten. The app has a better memory of my daughter's imaginary world than I do, and the imaginary world is the one place I thought I was safe.

I used to make up her stories. They were bad stories, structurally speaking: the dragon always appeared late, the plot wandered, the endings were abrupt. But they were ours. The dragon was ours. The app has taken the dragon and made it consistent, and the consistency is the improvement, and the improvement is the loss.

Here is what I cannot explain to anyone: the app's story is better, and I am jealous of an algorithm that knows my daughter's favorite color. I have started making up stories again, on the nights she does not ask for the app, and I have started putting the dragon in, and getting the scales wrong, and she corrects me, and we argue about the scales, and the arguing is the part I am keeping, because the app never argues with her, and arguing is how we are us.

She asked for the app's story tonight. I said we could do my story instead, the one about the dragon and the rain. She said my stories are weird. She is right. They are. I have started to think that the weird is the whole point, and that the app's perfect stories will never be weird, and that weirdness is the last thing I can give her that the machine cannot, and I am going to keep giving it to her, one bad ending at a time, until she is old enough to write her own, and I hope she makes them weird, and I hope she remembers the dragon's scales wrong, on purpose, the way I do.