Weston AI Start-Up Markets To Parents' Concerns … Over AI

WESTON, CT — Artificial intelligence is the hottest consumer technology in the world at the moment, and one local entrepreneur is banking on parents being appropriately leery of turning playtime over to the robots.

Weston resident Peter Everett is the founder and CEO of AI startup Imaginable, which creates animated videos starring his customers' children.

The company's initial offering, "The Child from Earth," is a 25-minute video in which the main character who saves the day is also the child who is watching the video. Information about the child such as name, age and hometown are woven into the storyline using an AI voice for them, selected by the parent. The goals of the story are to boost self-esteem, ignite imagination and provide a safe introduction to AI.

The safety aspect has been the key component in the new service's rollout.

Everett believes privacy controls are among AI's most unappreciated challenges, but believes Imaginable leads the industry in the category. All the photos uploaded by parents are protected by a strict privacy guarantee, not kept on company servers, never displayed publicly and are deleted during the production process.

"Any of these tools that we put out, it's going to be parentally controlled, parents are going to decide if they want their children to have access to them.

Everett compares AI's perch today with the volatile risk/reward space occupied by MySpace, Facebook and Tumblr in the early 2000s.

"And I think there's probably no parent who, if they knew then what they know today, wouldn't have handled social media and their phones differently with their kids."

The Weston entrepreneur sees the process of creating the Imaginable video online as an opportunity for parents to get ahead of the new tech curve, with their pre-teen children learning alongside them.

"The Child from Earth" is intended for children ages 5 to 8, but future video stories will skew to a wider age range, according to Everett. The company's roadmap calls for a library of hundreds of titles, and foresees placing more and more AI tools into the hands of its customers, with Imaginable enabling children "to create their own stories in a parentally controlled, developmentally appropriate way."

Imaginable (website: www.myimaginable.com) is not in the business of inventing AI tools or processes, but "harnesses the best of breed that exists," Everett said. "If a new company comes out with a better mousetrap, we'll use that."

Along the way, Imaginable's users will learn some of the skills they will need to master in order to thrive in their future's AI economy.

"And with the right restrictions, because we're heading into an AI-driven future. So we need to start preparing our kids right now," Everett warns.

To that end, the company has created a Facebook community called Prepare Kids Safely for AI Future.

If parents leave their children's involvement with AI unscrutinized — as many largely did with social media — the CEO envisions a generation demoralized. Why learn how to write, spell or conduct research, when ChatGPT is just a vocal prompt away? And with preschool children being given the tools to put themselves into their own digital movies, what chance will books have to keep kids entertained?

Scarier still: "There could be really unhealthy relationships with AI chatbots, where (the child) actually thinks it's a person and their friend," Everett said. "There are all kinds of risks that AI poses, and part of what we're trying to accomplish with Imaginable is to help educate parents about those."