How AI Personalized Books Work and How We Handle Photos

This page explains how a KidzTale storybook is made and what happens to the information you give us, including your child's photo. KidzTale publishes this article, so read it as a description of our own service. We checked it against the code that builds stories and against our privacy policy on 3 November 2026. Where we describe techniques other companies use, we label them; those sections do not describe what KidzTale runs.

Correction: an earlier version of this article said KidzTale deletes original photos after 30 days, uses LoRA fine-tuning and named image models, has people review flagged pages and runs a parental-consent process. None of that was accurate, and it has been removed. The sections below replace it.

What You Provide

• Your child's first name: the hero is named in every scene.

• Age: sets the vocabulary. Ages 4 and under get very simple words, ages 5 to 7 get simple vocabulary, and ages 8 and up get vocabulary for older children. Age does not change the number of pages or how much text each page has.

• A story idea, a quick theme or both: free text such as a first train ride to see Grandma, plus an optional quick theme (Bedtime, Fairy Tale, Space, Animals, Under the Sea, Dragons, Unicorns, Pirates, Forest or Princess).

• One photo of one child: required, and used as the likeness reference for the illustrations. You need to be signed in to upload it.

• Art style: six styles in the creator. The quick checkout flow uses one fixed style.

• Narration voice: a stock female or male AI voice, or your own recorded voice if you have set up voice narration in Settings (+1 credit per story).

• Length: 9 pages as standard, or 16 pages for one extra credit.

There are no separate fields for gender, ethnicity, interests or personality. Anything you want in the story, such as a pet's name, a fear you want to handle gently or a favourite food, goes in the story idea.

Stage 1: Writing the Story Text

Your child's name, age, story idea and theme go in one request through OpenRouter, a service that routes requests to AI model providers. When we checked on 3 November 2026 the request used an OpenAI GPT-4.1 model; the model may change. The instructions ask for exactly 9 or 16 pages, 2 to 3 sentences per page, your child as the hero, a clear beginning, middle and happy ending, and a positive, age-appropriate story.

For each page the model also writes a scene description for the illustration: your child's pose, outfit, expression and setting. Scene descriptions deliberately leave out hair colour, skin tone, eye colour and ethnicity, because the photo is the reference for how your child looks.

What this means for you: the text is generated by software, not written by a person. It can repeat ideas, misread your story idea or get a real-world fact wrong, such as which dinosaurs lived together. Read the book yourself before you read it with your child.

Stage 2: Drawing the Illustrations

Each scene description and your photo are sent to illustration workflows hosted on fal.ai, an AI media provider. The photo is used as a reference image so the illustrated hero resembles your child. We don't publish which image model runs inside those workflows, so this article doesn't name one. KidzTale does not train or fine-tune a model on your child's photo.

How close the likeness looks varies from photo to photo and page to page. A clear, front-facing photo in good light, with only your child in it, gives the illustrations the best reference. Each book features one child.

Stage 3: Narration and Optional Animation

Narration is switched on by default and uses stock AI voices generated through fal.ai. If you set up your own voice in Settings (a recording of at least 10 seconds), stories can be narrated with a clone of that voice for one extra credit per story. The cloning and speech models are MiniMax models accessed through fal.ai. Only the first voice saved on the account is used.

Animated illustrations cost three extra credits in the creator. Each illustration is turned into a short, silent clip that plays in its place in the online reader while the narration plays separately. There is no single video file and no download for the clips.

What You Receive

A standard 9-page story costs $5.99, and credit packs are listed on the pricing page. Payment comes before generation, and there is no free preview. A book is usually ready in a few minutes. For more on the photo step itself, see personalized books with your child's photo.

Limits and What Nobody Checks

• No human review: no person reads the story or looks at the illustrations before you see them, and KidzTale's pipeline has no separate content-check step of its own. The only safeguard on our side is the instruction to keep the story positive and age-appropriate.

• No editing: pages cannot be edited or regenerated after a story is made. A new story uses a new credit.

• Refunds: unused credits can be refunded if you contact us within 30 days of purchase. Credits already used for a story are not refundable, but a failed or defective generation is remade or its credit returned. See the Terms.

• Something wrong: if a story contains something inappropriate, an illustration is broken or the book didn't finish, contact us with the story title.

Where Your Child's Photo Goes

KidzTale uploads original photos to fal.ai storage and uses AI service providers to create illustrations. Photo URLs are saved with stories and any child profiles you save, so originals can remain available after generation. In practice:

• No automatic deletion: KidzTale does not set an expiry date for uploaded photos or delete them automatically when the book is finished.

• Links are not sign-in protected: a provider-hosted photo link can be opened by anyone who has the link. Don't share original-photo links.

• Training: KidzTale does not run training or fine-tuning jobs on your photos. fal.ai's API services terms say it will not use client content to train its products, with an exception for models it marks Pending Enterprise Ready. We don't claim a separate no-training agreement covering every model.

• Advertising: KidzTale does not sell photos or give them to advertisers.

fal.ai's own data retention documentation says it stores the inputs and outputs of requests by default so they can be retrieved later, and that files uploaded to its CDN are handled separately from those request records. The page doesn't state a fixed retention period.

How to Delete Photos and Data

• Account deletion: in the KidzTale iPhone app, Profile then Delete Account removes your account and its database records, including stories, child profiles and saved voice records. The website doesn't currently have a delete-account button.

• Provider copies: deleting the account does not erase photos, voice samples or generated files held by providers. Email privacy@kidztale.com from your account email address and say what you want deleted. Don't re-send the photo or your password.

• Timing: we answer data-rights requests within 30 days. We don't promise that a hosted file disappears the moment a database record is deleted.

The full detail is in sections 4, 7 and 8 of the privacy policy.

Who Holds an Account

KidzTale is for parents and guardians. Accounts and purchases must be made by an adult aged 18 or over, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13. The parent provides the child's name, age and photo. There is no separate parental-consent verification step, because the parent is the account holder. The FTC explains the US children's privacy law on its Children's Privacy page.

The Providers Involved

General Industry Techniques (Not What KidzTale Runs)

Other AI book services may describe their likeness technology with terms you'll see in reviews and marketing. Two publicly documented approaches:

• Image-prompt adapters: IP-Adapter (Ye and colleagues, 2023) is a small add-on that lets an existing text-to-image model take a reference image alongside the text prompt, without training a new model for each person.

• Per-person fine-tuning: LoRA trains a small set of extra model weights. Used for personalization, it means training on photos of one person, which creates a person-specific file that has to be stored and deleted.

Why it matters to you: if a service trains anything on your child's photos, ask where the trained file is kept and how to delete it, as well as the photo itself.

Questions to Ask Any AI Book Service Before Uploading a Photo

AI Books Alongside Other Books

A personalized AI book does one specific job: it puts your child in a story about a moment that matters to your family, such as a birthday, a new sibling or a first day somewhere new. It doesn't replace the range of a library card or the read-aloud classics of children's publishing. The reading together, the pauses and the questions still come from you.

For more context, see personalized books vs traditional books and AI-generated vs hand-illustrated books.