While social media debates whether Google Gemini AI storybooks are genius or dangerous, I've been busy creating dozens of them. Here's what actually works (and why it's more fun than you think)

Lessons learnt from a few dozens of AI Storybooks and Countless Experiments, including mistakes. AI Storytelling How-to with Gemini Storybooks.

Aug 26, 2025

On Tuesday August 5 Google launched Gemini Storybook feature and I remember the date because I was immediately hooked, and so while I thought I’d wait until weekend to experiment, I ended spending my next 40 hours just creating storybooks.

For those who don’t know me well yet, I love illustrations, specially pencil and watercolors, I am also a photographer and writer, and have mostly focussed on landscapes and travel. I was always writing, but started blogging using google blogger in 2005 or 6 and was consistently working on it until end of 2015, when my sales job got exceptionally demanding, and I had no time to write anymore. there was also a shift in keeping your experience personal or so. so the love for storytelling is nothing new, and it made perfect sense that I’d jump on the opportunity to create some cute storybooks even on a hump day!

My first Gemini storybook

On Wednesday morning, I created my first storybook, my first thought, AI, my second a woman, and my third, well adventure. - none of these three are alien to me, because I live an breathe them every day. I called her AIRA ( my niece’s name) I wanted to give her a fun, quirky adventure! and so I did.

the prompt was simple, unstructured. the first looked a bit sad, but I got some perfect illustrations, ( One of my favorite above) and second was one hilarious tale. ( in the youtube video) and this is exactly how this story of about 2 dozens of storybook or rather the AI storytelling experiment began.

Edit - in my flow I forgot to mention. this is how you access the app. its integrated with in gemini chat window. you can follow the URL or select the storybook in Gemini chat sidebar.

In the beginning there was chaos -

So before I start on the the experiments and lessons, Lets get rid of the clutter and outside voices first. there’s been lot of chatter past 3 weeks about goods and bads of this with different take on what it could be used for, and also ethical issues. here’s a quick review of what everyone’s been talking about.

Social Media Reactions : Mixed Reception Across Platforms

Google's launched Gemini Storybook feature branding it as a tool for parents to turn in to digital storyteller themself and help ‘em tell their kids their personalized bedtime stories, of course, including explaining the kids what they do in a simple fun way. the reaction was lovely, from parents of course, but the storytelling writers went up in arms. for past 20 days have generated significant discussion across social media platforms, with reactions ranging from enthusiastic adoption to creators’ hating it for quality? or like they hate everything AI, and I also saw some serious concerns about safety, as the results being dangerous.

Reddit was interesting :

The r/singularity subreddit showed strong positive reception, with one post receiving 185 votes and users calling it "crazy good". However, some users expressed philosophical concerns, with one commenting: "You could have envisioned it yourself, but instead, you opted to have an AI do the imagining for you". Not very different from Publishers Weekly reporting mixed industry reactions, with children's book advocates expressing concern about AI-generated content displacing human creativity. Martha Brockenbrough, a children's book author, compared AI-generated stories to "serving them powdered orange juice made in an unregulated factory".

Oh but they like the technical capabilities
In r/Bard, users discovered the feature was "wild" with its ability to write and narrate custom stories in seconds. The discussion included practical questions about access, with users sharing direct links to the feature at gemini.google.com/gem/storybook. also the character consistency was praised across scenes, acknowledging it "handles that impressively well". But most had mixed feeling about the launch as google’s implementation kind of overshadowed their own AI-driven narrative projects.

On LinkedIn?

professionals praised Gemini Storybook for its creative uses beyond kids’ stories. Marketers called it a “game-changer” but suggested it should work as a co-author for deeper educational value. Others used it to turn business reports and career stories into engaging, illustrated narratives. Still, some, like attorney Danielle van Lier, voiced concerns about character inconsistency and inappropriate content, noting issues like unexplained changes in character ethnicity, especially in coloring book styles.

Twitter/X -

Was all around excited, As Google's official channels promoted the feature actively, with the Gemini App account highlighting that "Storybook is a way to create personalized, illustrated stories that you can read, listen to, print, and share". Many users expressed excitement about the immediate practical applications.

And Substack -

has been all over with the commentary and long form analysis. and considering an AI survey that substack did, I am not surprised by the reactions.
But overall, Gemini Storybook is getting praise from marketers and educators for its creativity, polished results, and versatility in everything from brand storytelling to teaching complex ideas.

Here Are Few Common Themes Across Platforms

also helps us understand how multi-purpose this tool could be. Let me put some emoticons to add-in my experiences, just to state what I haven’t experienced / din’t come across yet.

Positive Reactions:

Speed and ease of use ✅
Creative applications beyond children's stories ✅
Business and educational potential ✅
Accessibility across languages and devices ✅
Professional presentation quality ✅

Critical Concerns:

Image safety and inappropriate content generation ❓❌
Character consistency issues ✅
Racial bias in default representations ✅ ❌
Lack of child development expertise ❌
Quality compared to human-created content ❌
Copyright and artist compensation issues ❓

Notable User Innovations:

Language learning applications with graded readers ✅
Business presentations and brand storytelling ✅
Therapeutic and educational content creation ✅
Family memory preservation ✅

Laura Holmes, a former Google product manager and founder of Wanderly, published a comprehensive critique titled "Why I'm offended by Google Gemini's Storybook". Her analysis identified five major concerns: I am adding my experience with it.

Image Safety Issues: Holmes documented that simple prompts about mermaids and aliens generated inappropriate images containing nudity ❌
Excessive Assumptions: The system makes decisions about character names, appearances, and motivations without user input ✅
Racial Bias: Default characters are consistently portrayed as "light-haired, fair-skinned" children ❌ ✅
Uninformed Child Development: The tool suggests coping strategies without understanding the root causes of children's concerns ❌
Uncontrolled Environment: Children could access inappropriate content with minimal safeguards ❌

the traditional biases like portraying Bosses and Seniors as Male with ties, and using default characters appearance and names as white, have been plaguing all the AI tools, so I am not going to crucifying Storybooks for just that, but with that thought here comes the first important lesson.

Craft your prompt well and You’d get exactly what you want.

and I learnt it but not in the hard way because it was fun to experiment and experience the whole process but it took long and lessons came in batches too. so here I took a tea break from writing this article to think what could be the based way to share it. should i make it from lessons with stories as examples, main stories and lessons learnt from them, or what all you could do with lessons and stories with in, and felt the second works better with the flow of story so here we go!

Chapter 1 - Aira’s adventures

This is where we go back to my first ever storybooks about AI’s adventure. as a habit now, Just like I would do for a video, or image, I created a prompt using perplexity and passed it on to storybooks

No defining pages
No giving instructions on the images or text
no uploads
Just giving a storyline theme and a characters’ sentiments, and gemini run with it.

I love the story and images, as they came out, but it looked a bit sad, so I went for another round and asked for humor and it turned out as in the video above. one word - fantastic.

not just bedtime stories for children, no.
You can experiment, and create random and unique stories through your imagination. Huge scope to build any storyline and build on it.
Image quality was great. storytelling not so bad.
pro / enterprise gemini account have sharing restrictions so if you want to create a share link, you need to either change your settings, or go to your non-pro gmail account and create the stories there.
gemini chat has all the history mixed up with storybooks and research and videos all in same sidebar, together. the icon helps to identify the storybooks but its a mess.

as I edited to make my storybook more fun, than a sad tale, I learnt my entire storybook had changed - illustrations and text both, I obviously wasn’t bothered but then came the second chapter where editing with in begins.

Chapter 2 - Past Travel stories ( Pdfs, Images, Blogs)

So in my next round of experiment I decide to pick few of own and family’s past adventures. and here comes the bias in plenty.

I uploaded the pictures from my family’s travel, and it automatically used the name Priya and Raj for my parents. they had to have white hair both of them and my brother, well got a typical london haircut, and was in shorts consistently through out the 10 pages even though I uploaded 2 pictures of him on the beach.

Lessons learnt :

you can upload pictures. and it’ll reflect the background and imitate some pictures as it is.
there is character biases, in heavy.
if you’d like to make changes in how the characters look and who they resemble, it may take some instructions successfully while other may fail spectacularly. - I told it my mom’s hair are long and black. it did change the hair to long but kept them white. my mother’ wasn’t very happy. - On the other hand, my brother had six-pack and was shirtless through out, he said he doesn’t look like that right now, so he wasn’t happy either. he’s back in the gym now. so I guess it was motivating?
you can get the name changed, but it hallucinates, so if you continue to edit the storybook through multiple prompts, it may keep changing the storybook and even going back to previous one and failing entirely.

Now that I knew a little bit of how it works, I decided to go with pdf uploads that had both pictures and text with storyline, I took two of my very different travel blog articles, one from 2010 and another from 2015, and moved to my regular gmail -gemini account so I dont have any sharing issue.

The ladakh memoir ended up with at least 10 versions. first and foremost, Priya, gemini’s favorite indian female name - earlier my mother , and now me, both we called Priya. this is when the pdf clearly specifies my name, as you can see on the left above. as it turned out a friend also was creating a storybook and his female character was automatically named Priya and looked almost like me.! - well I din’t like it so I decided to change.

added some quotes on cover as well, and I believe I should have a copy with just quotes on the pages with images but I can’t find it right now. so here Lets go straight to the lesson learned.

Lessons learnt :

gemini automatically decided the storybook is meant for a child or adult. my first story was categorized adult, which I think gemini decided after reading the script. the ladakh tale was categorized child friendly, but no specifications in there.
if you provide photos and text story - it takes the flow but you need to specify the tone, and additional details about who’s narrating the story.
if its throwing the errors, better start afresh.
you can make specific changes, by specifying the page number or text details, but better do it one by one, or it may take one instruction and forget the other.
here I added a prompt for multiple pages at the same time, ( not a very fine prompt to go look in to pdf but i was just chilling so )
I could changed the language easily with single prompt for entire storybook
tried adding the chapter headline for each pages and adding a quote, but that din’t work. which means » it takes the text in one full passage with no breaks.

for my 2015 story I was able to get the collage of the exact photos that I uploaded in the pdf file along with some new images generated based on the story told.

For those complaining about consistency of the images, if you do not provide multiple pictures the character look are auto generated based on the story and used through out the storybook which can be a bit boring, so prompt it to use the unique landscape and clothing and specify the character looks.

Chapter 3 - Chatlogs, NotebookLM, Multiple characters

As you can see from the screenshot, I can’t scroll back anymore so I kind of lost the thread, as I find out just now, but never mind. for this experiment, I picked up a brief from my notebookLM notes, about top 10 and 20 moments from a chat. since by now I had figured out the number of pages is limited to 10 to 12. ( it gave me 12 once ) i gave it 10 moments for 10 pages with 10 characters ( a few repeat) from different backgrounds and it resulted in multiple copies to fix, from names to ethnicities. the images were still great and it picked up the story edits well, but it as never perfected. for example - below two different generated pages for same moment.

to try it further I gave it a story with 4 women with different background on a trip to greece. and while it was able to create the storyline the images were not only biased but gemini had hard time fitting 4 people in the same frame.

results, it kept on duplicated the same character, getting it right sometimes and wrongs almost all the time. !

Lessons learnt :

keep it simple for now, use 1-2 characters at max.

Chapter 4 - Movies and Series

If you gotten tired reading it, I apologies, this is the second last chapter and this is also where the fun actually begins. While I could create some great looking storybooks so far, it was kinda tiring to go on editing spree, and It so happened that google limited the daily quota, on non-pro accounts as well. By now I also learnt that I wanted to craft my prompt per page as finely as possible, so i have to make least amount of changes once the storybook is created.

and here I skipped perplexity and instead created this prompt on google AI mode after looking for the storyline of one of my favoriteGreek film from 1988 called Topío stin Omíchli ie "Landscape in the Mist". I asked it to create the pages, edited the prompt to add the image type, colors etc and the storyline text for each page, before taking it all to the storybook. below was the prompt.

Okay create the story book from below details of the a black and white movie that i loved the story of the movie is - Theo Angelopoulos's 1988 film, Landscape in the Mist, tells the poignant story of two young siblings, 11-year-old Voula (Tania Palaiologou) and 5-year-old Alexandros (Michalis Zeke), who embark on a journey across Greece in search of their supposedly German father.

Their mother has fabricated the story of their father's existence to keep them content, but Voula and Alexandros, yearning for their father, escape their unstable home life and set out to find him.

Their journey is a harsh and perilous coming-of-age odyssey, exposing them to the raw realities of the adult world. They encounter various individuals, some kind like Orestis (Stratos Tzortzoglou), a roadie who offers them temporary shelter and companionship, while others are cruel and exploitative.

The search for their father, a potentially non-existent figure, becomes a metaphor for their search for belonging, safety, and a sense of identity in a desolate and uncaring world.

The film uses evocative imagery and a slow, contemplative pace to portray the children's journey as a dreamlike odyssey filled with both moments of harsh reality and surreal encounters, like witnessing a giant marble hand emerging from the sea. I have also created suggestive pages details you can use to build the story.- 

Here are 10 illustration prompts based on the story of "Landscape in the Mist":

Page 1: The Escape: Illustrate young Voula and Alexandros, a girl and a little boy, sneaking out of their home, carrying small bags, with a glimpse of a town in the background. Perhaps include a sense of determination and a hint of trepidation on their faces.

Page 2: The Train Station: Show Voula and Alexandros at a bustling train station, trying to board a train, appearing overwhelmed by the crowds, and eventually being led away by a police officer.

Page 3: The Uncle's House: Depict the children at their uncle's home, eavesdropping as the uncle explains to the officer that their father is in Germany and that their mother has been telling them a lie.

Page 4: Snowy Departure: Illustrate the children escaping during a blizzard, the snowflakes swirling around them as they disappear into the distance, reinforcing a sense of isolation and resilience.

Page 5: The Roadie: Show the children on a desolate road, perhaps walking or hitchhiking, and encountering Orestis, the friendly roadie, offering them a ride in his broken-down bus. Convey a sense of cautious hope and the beginnings of companionship.

Page 6: The Traveling Theatre Troupe: Illustrate the children's time with Orestis's travelling theatre troupe, showing them engaged and possibly finding a sense of belonging amidst the performances and the communal life of the actors.

Page 7: Crossing the Border: Illustrate the children attempting to cross a border, perhaps showing a barbed-wire fence or a natural barrier, emphasizing the challenges and risks of their journey.

Page 8: The Desolate Landscape: Show the children traversing a vast and lonely landscape, emphasizing the mist and the expansive nature of their journey, symbolizing their search for something beyond their grasp.

Page 9: The Giant Hand: Illustrate a surreal and powerful image of the giant marble hand emerging from the sea, showcasing the film's dreamlike and mythical qualities and the children's wonder at the sight.

Page 10: The Landscape in the Mist: Illustrate the final image of the lone tree emerging through the mist, symbolizing the children's arduous quest and the ambiguous nature of their destination and the enduring search for meaning.

the result : https://g.co/gemini/share/80e70843be73

This is by far one of my best storybook, I could almost recreate what I wanted to from the imagery point of view, including the landscape and characters. the story was also very well told with in 10 pages / chapters only.

I wanted to try one more so I went with another favorite but completely different movie called the “the winged migration” in the same thread and it did an alright job - remember the crowd from chapter 3? Yup. too many elements and it slips.

Lessons learnt :

I loved everything about this method, and workflow, it was the most smooth - dont’ blame me if people go about creating their favorite series storybooks but yeah this is FUN. and Oh I’d love to see if you do so do share.
Google AI prompt does work way better than the perplexity Ai created prompt, at least for storybooks.
You can create multiple different storybooks in the same thread.
While creating a public sharing link, gemini takes away your name from both the cover page and the right top on every page. :/ so good luck with the copyrights.
There is lag in the voice which you have to deal with while we are still in storybook experiment phase. I converted few stories in hindi and the audio was faster, so if you record and upload those , you may need to slow it down a tad bit.
Did i forget yet? Just like Priya and Raj, gemini also love Ella and Silas and would use those name even after you detail them out. So yes no option but to edit it.

and alas here comes the final chapter and this is the shortest.

Chapter 5 - Actual AI storytelling

So after all this experimentation and learning, I decided to try gemini storybook for one project that I wanted to do for ages. which is learning and translating the ancient text in easier way. the ancient stories from the Hindu literature, something I skim from time to time but haven’t had a chance to regularly read. so this give me a fun way to interact with those granthas and I can also bring in some consistency and make it a habit.

One of the main challenge with such a project is the creating the collection of stories and bringing in the same atmosphere in the imagery that reflect the same timeline and culture. I have created 4 stories so far in both english and hindi - for hindi i used the same prompt but prefixed it with hindi most of the times. but as I went with the process of creation i wanted to create slightly different images for each version. so i created separate prompts.

To take it this project seriously I also created a dedicated channel just for this - https://www.youtube.com/@Aranyakah and here’s one of the story video.

Lessons learnt :

very much like making a movie but 3 minutes and its still images only, so slightly easier that way then video scripting and making.
this can be hard work but not so much if its well thought out and if you enjoy the process. do it if you love it.
any story is possible, for adults, for kids, those both can share..!

Conclusion

AI storytelling isn’t stealing creativity or jobs of creative writers or storytellers. To create a good storybook you need to work equally hard, While, unlike traditional creative tools, AI storytelling platforms can quickly produce entire narratives—often personalized, illustrated, and interactive—using advanced language and image models, to get good content the background work, and thought process is still much the same. so it should be used as a form of art on its own. AI storytelling can democratize content creation, making it easy for anyone—regardless of writing or artistic skill—to bring their ideas to life, opening up endless possibilities for personalization, multilingual storytelling, and accessibility.

Like Google Gemini storybook, There are plenty of similar AI-powered creative and storybook apps, that are used for everything from children’s bedtime stories and educational materials to business presentations and creative experiments. Apps similar to Gemini Storybook include ChatGPT (with tools like DALL-E for images), Claude, Simplified, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, Poe by Quora, and ModelsLab—many of which allow users to generate stories, images, and even voice narration, sometimes for both kids and professional uses. As more people experiment with these platforms, AI storytelling is reshaping how we create, share, and experience stories in the digital age. However, while the technology is fun and powerful, it also raises questions about quality, originality, safety, and the influence of algorithms on culture and creativity.

Google Gemini overall has over 82 million monthly active users as of Q2 2025, with 284 million total visits in February 2025 alone and a sharp rise in use since launch. Storybook-specific data isn't yet public, but its rapid adoption is highlighted by educators, parents, and business users since its global launch in August 2025.

I may have missed few points but this article has already taken me almost over 6 hours to write. ✍️ and its 3:47am 😢 So closing it and publishing now. I hope you enjoyed the breakdown and its motivating enough for you to try storybook yourself. Write your questions in the comments and share your stories, and have fun storytelling!

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