An AI model writes it. Your child decides what it is about.

It asks a handful of questions, and every answer it gets is used as given — not tidied up, not improved on, not quietly swapped for a better idea. That is the part that does not move: it fills in what your child leaves, and it never writes over what they said.

The planned system uses cloud services to write the sentences and create the illustrations. It builds a story around the child’s choices and supplies details they leave open.

A few words about a dragon can be enough to begin. A child who has more to say can shape the characters, events, ending and title in greater detail.

So this is a dial rather than a promise, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying. Four words about a dragon and a shrug still produce a book that exists only because they said dragon, and that no publisher would have printed. Ten minutes of a six year old explaining why the dragon is frightened of the postman produces a book nobody else on earth could have described.

Both are theirs in the way that counts at bedtime: nothing was written in advance, and nothing was sitting there waiting for a name to be dropped into it. But the second one is the book that gets read forty times, and what gets you there is not the machine. It is the person sitting next to them asking what happened next.

Read the shelf and the claim stops being something you have to take on trust. Not one of these is a story with a name dropped into it, and not one of them is a story anybody but a child would have thought of:

There is a market of exactly one for every one of them, which is precisely why no publisher will print them — and why the only way they exist is a machine that had no story in it beforehand.

A personalised picture book puts your child’s name into a story somebody else wrote, and prints it on the cover as the character. This prints it as the author — a credit for whose story it is, which has never been the same claim as whose sentences they are.

That is one word being made to carry two completely different products, and it is worth being precise about which one is on offer here. Nobody wrote these stories in advance — not a publisher, and not us. There was nothing for a name to be put into.

Which makes this the part that decides how much of the book is theirs. None of it means leaving a four year old alone with a machine: the better version has two of you at the table, and you are the one who asks “and then what?” when they get stuck, and the one who works out that the animal they are describing is a badger. Helping a child say what they mean is not deciding it for them. The line is not who is sitting there — it is whose decisions end up in the book, and every one you draw out of them is one more that is theirs rather than the model’s.