Fable Box Books Uses AI to Make Your Child the Main Character
In search of ways to draw their own children away from Cocomelon and into their library, the founders of Fable Box put them into their own books.
According to pioneering child and developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of epistemology, children spend five years in the egocentric stage of development. The theory suggests that through ages two to seven, give or take, children struggle to understand that other people have different perspectives, thoughts and feelings to their own.
They’re essentially the main characters of their own stories. In storybooks, however, that’s not the case; there are actual main characters, sometimes far removed from the children reading. If your little girl doesn’t look like Snow White, will she grow up into someone who bites apples from old ladies she doesn’t know? Fable Box Books, a new subsidiary of software solution company Omoto, uses artificial intelligence to place your child directly into their own Storybook as their very own main character.
Fable Box Books was founded by Mostafa Moussa and Omar Marei, two school friends who recently became parents, when they noticed that around the time their children were turning three years old, they began to take less of an interest in books. “When our children would go to friends’ houses and see all the screens and fast-paced entertainment, they were charmed,” Marei tells CairoScene. “We wanted to find a way to bring their interest back to reading.” At the time, generative AI was a new gimmick that Moussa and Marei, as tech nerds in their own right, were playing with, and they decided to use it to create a single storybook where Moussa’s daughter was the main character.
“The first time we read the book to a child, it was a really magical experience. They couldn't believe that they were in the book. They wanted more,” Moussa says. "As new parents, the hardest thing in the world is learning how to figure out life with your kid. They go through all these milestone situations, where they need your help, like potty training or being scared of the dark. When I read my daughter a story, she often wants me to keep reading it over and over for her. It’s like she wants to remember what she did in the story to overcome that fear or issue.”
There is, understandably, concern around reading your child a book that’s made with AI, which is why Fable Box works with a network of child psychologists and children’s book authors to ensure the safety of their releases. The books themselves are not AI-generated; Fable Box’s available stories are ones sourced from open-access children’s classic literature, and approved by certified child psychologists.
Fable Box’s AI has only one role: to turn uploaded pictures of your child into an illustration that looks like your child, and has their name, in the book. The bot itself is built by Fable Box, guaranteeing its security, and is only capable of changing the appearance of the main character in books. It’s based on a ‘safe AI’ model, meaning that it’s incapable of producing any content that isn’t safe for children. Every single book Fable Box produces is manually revised before printing. Fable Box is also currently working on producing original stories, powered by previously published children’s book authors and illustrators.
“The real fundamental of Fable Box is actual education, AI is just a tool that allows us to add a bit of magic to books," Moussa explains. "We’re using AI as a functional way to teach kids the morality in fables, it’s not the brand or the business model.”
Essentially, what Fable Box provides is a technological solution to a technological issue. Nearly every modern parent struggles with getting their children away from Cocomelon and into the real world. Decades ago, it may have been easier to get your child to read, but now, it’s become a much more complex situation. Instead of spending weeks and months trying to get your child to sit down to read one story, this service plants them inside the Fable Box, where they can then explore a broader world of children’s literature. Fable Box produces books in 7-14 days, and they deliver in over 100 countries.
“Through actually creating these books, we've noticed that children do not just come back to read our books, they've become much more excited about reading in general,” says Marei.
“My daughter is turning six in January, and through reading these books, she’s learning how to write her name,” Moussa adds. “It’s just really magical watching her interact with herself as a character in a story.”
