As a new father, Jose Gonzales was disappointed to find so few picture books featuring characters who look like his daughter. “She’s biracial,” he says. “A lot of the popular children’s books have a white, blue-eyed, blonde girl as the main character.” And books that did feature biracial kids were too often focused on diversity as a subject, rather than telling the story about a kid that, say, wanted to be an astronaut, and just happens to be biracial.
“I want for her growing up to realize that her diversity is really important, but that it’s not her entire identity, and that she can be anything,” Gonzales says.
That’s why in 2023, Gonzales teamed up with two former Amazon colleagues to found Naria, a startup that allows children and their parents to utilize AI to self-publish books complete with their very own characters and story lines. Families have already made more than 100,000 stories on the platform. The startup is currently participating in the Techstars accelerator program, and wants to further simplify creation with the development of dedicated iOS and Android apps.
Naria’s web-based editor lets children and parents/guardians describe their main characters or upload photos to create illustrations based on real people, and then use generative AI to create backgrounds, plot outlines, and more. “Kids can make themselves a main character, but also [use] any characters they come up with, and create their own stories and universes,” Gonzales says.
The resulting story can be ordered as a physical, one-of-a-kind book. In that regard, Naira books are similar to personalized storybooks that have been available for decades—except with a lot more creative freedom, as most of those existing services only change the names in picture books that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience. “It’s now your story, not someone else’s story,” Gonzales says. “That’s much more powerful.”
Building Naria has been a learning process for Gonzales and his cofounders. “When we started, we thought the AI should do most of the heavy lifting,” he says. But during early testing, the team quickly discovered that children actually preferred agency over automation. “At the end of the day, kids really wanted to hold a pen,” he says.
Instead of generating the entire story in one swoop, Naira now lets children add to their story, page by page. Characters can be freely placed on the page, and storylines can be tweaked throughout. “We really see it more as an enabler, not as the doer,” Gonzales says.
Artificial intelligence as a tool that helps ordinary people to create works that look and feel professional: That promise has led to a boom in generative AI apps. Writing articles, composing photo-realistic images and high-end illustrations, and even recording film sequences that increasingly look like they were produced on Hollywood sets—there’s seemingly nothing generative AI can’t do.
The AI boom is increasingly worrisome to those working in creative industries (as well as consumers, who must now wade through thousands of poorly written AI-generated books on Amazon), and one could imagine that some take issue with a service like Naria as well. However, Laura Morarity, owner of Wunderland, an online bookstore specializing in titles for children and teens, actually sees some upsides in the AI competition.
“The number of children reading for fun decreases every year, and it only gets worse as children get to around 9 years old,” Morarity says. “I see tools like Naria as an opportunity for kids to get excited about writing, reading and coming to value creativity.”
For his part, Gonzales wants to win over skeptics by further teaming up with authors and illustrators. For example, there’s an idea to allow authors and illustrators to add their characters to Naria, and essentially allow kids to remix their stories, while compensating them for the use of their intellectual property. He likens this to the way YouTube allows music rights holders to financially benefit from user-uploaded videos that feature their songs. “I think there’s a way we can all win,” he says.
The big question is: How will book publishers react if Naria succeeds? Morarity hopes that the industry won’t take away the wrong lesson from the service. “AI can’t replicate the depth of creativity, care, and emotion that you find in the pages of author- and illustrator-created children’s books,” she says. “I’m sure there are publishers out there who might dabble, but it would be a sad day if any of them actually tried to replace artists with machines.”
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