Charlie is six years old. He is the grandson of a cousin of mine who I met at supper over the Christmas holidays last week. His grandmother showed me a book she bought Charlie for Christmas. It was a short but well-made book with slick paper and professional-looking illustrations. What amazed me about it was the way it was customized. Not only did it have Charlie's name in bold black type on the cover, but Charlie himself, complete with thick glasses, was portrayed in a recognizable artwork on the front cover, and also showed up as the main character on most of the thirty or so pages.
I asked the grandmother how much it cost. "It wasn't cheap," she said, "but it was worth it." For his part, Charlie seemed to be tickled with it too.
Back home, I looked up the outfit that makes these books. It's something called CoziTales. Because I have no research staff and spend only an hour a week on this blog, I cannot say whether CoziTales is associated in any way with the homonymous COZITV, an over-the-air TV network that shows reruns of old TV shows.
Their website makes plain what they do. If you supply them with some basic information about the target child (name, age, sex) and presumably some photos (I didn't have a photo of a kid available to try it out, but they need a good photo or two), they will insert a recognizable artistic likeness of said child into any one of a number of storybooks. The available stories fall into the categories of Seasonal, Popular Adventures, Magical Realms, Nature and Exploration, and Imagination and Wonder. I failed to see the category of Budding AI Developer among the themes, but maybe it's in there somewhere. If you want your kid to have a job that hasn't been replaced by AI when he or she grows up, you might want to get them interested in AI now.
Presumably, the firm takes the images and generates (almost certainly by AI, although the existence of a horde of fantastically skilled and underpaid artists somewhere is remotely possible) the images for the chosen story, with your selected child appearing as the main character. Then it's only a matter of approving it and paying for it. According to (sorry) an AI search, prices start at $40, and you should allow four days for production. That's all—four days. Plus shipping time, of course.
I suppose back in 1958, somebody like J. Paul Getty could have hired an artist, handed him some photos of a favored grandson, and commissioned a customized storybook of this kind, when I was of an age to be in the market for such a thing. But it would have cost many thousands of dollars for the artist's pay, the printing of a single copy, etc. Now in 2025, it's a mass-market thing—anybody with a good picture of one's little darling can create a truly unique artifact at a price most people can afford.
It's another specific example of a process I've seen happen in countless ways over the course of my lifetime: the transformation of an economically valued product or service from something only governments or rich people can afford, to something that nearly everyone can afford. It happened with watching any movie you want privately (a privilege formerly reserved for the President of the United States, who could get any movie for the White House viewing room in 24 hours) to sending messages worldwide (something that only businessmen and news organizations could afford to do routinely until the 1970s), to doing fantastically complex calculations involved in artificial intelligence (something that only researchers could do as recently as twenty years ago, but is now devolving to your laptop or phone).
If the product or service involved is benign, there's really no ethical issue of significance involved in the mass-consumer transformation of a formerly costly and one-off product or service. Person-to-person telecommunication, for instance, whether by email, voice, or video, is almost entirely a benign technology. It's a good thing that I can send a message to a friend in the Ukraine in two minutes for basically no cost, rather than scribbling on flimsy blue paper, licking it and putting in in the mail, and hoping he'll get it two or three weeks later—or months, before air mail.
And this business of putting a kid into a customized storybook looks pretty benign to me, at least at first glance. CoziTales is aware of the concern that they are in a position to collect names, ages, faces, and Internet info on thousands of young children, and they address those concerns in their frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) page. They have a simple statement answering the question, "Is my child's photo secure?" which goes, "Absolutely. All photos are encrypted, used only to create your story, and automatically deleted after processing." And I'm sure that's the company's intention too. But determined hackers can invade even the best-intentioned firms. It depends on the value of the data to the hacker and the quality of the IT defenses that the company maintains.
CoziTales seems to be pretty new, as there is not much auxiliary information I could find on the Internet and many of the FAQs have a newbie air about them. International shipping or foreign languages are not yet available, for instance, but they hope to add these capabilities soon.
If I encounter a new AI-powered thing and I can think of a pre-AI analogy to it that turned out okay, I feel better about it, whether or not the analogy proves anything. The first analogy I could think of for a CoziTales book is those painted boards you see outside tourist attractions, at which you position your face behind a hole in the board and have someone take your picture as Caveman and Wife Dragged Along Behind at a show cave, or Sexy Bathing-Suit-Clad Gal and Hunky Boyfriend at a beach. I'm not aware that any child photographed in such a setting has suffered long-term emotional damage from it, and I doubt that Charlie's CoziTales book will bring anything but pleasure to him.
So why talk about it in an engineering ethics column? Well, I say so many negative things about AI in this space that it's only fair I put out something positive for a change. It's too late to get your favorite nephew one for Christmas, but there's always birthdays.
Sources: I referred to the CoziTales website https://cozitales.com/ and a Google AI query about how much a book costs. And Charlie, of course. His age is an estimate, as I didn't have time to interview him in detail.
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