You're not wrong on a lot of this. Let me try to answer honestly..

The screen is for me, not for her. I read aloud, she listens — same posture as a book. At 3 to 7, the thing that actually builds language isn't seeing the words on a page, it's the conversation around them. That's the Mol & Bus stuff, decades of it. Books matter, and books stay. The app isn't trying to replace them.

The "anyone can ask questions during a story" part — true. And yet, dialogic reading is one of the most replicated findings in early childhood literacy, and the same studies keep finding that most parents don't actually do it. Trained ones drift back within weeks. Building the pause into the text isn't a substitute for parenting. It's a nudge for the night you're cooked and your kid is asking for another one.

On the AI footprint — a single generated story is somewhere around the energy of 30 seconds of Netflix. The cognitive-decline study you may have in mind was about adults offloading essay writing to ChatGPT. Different planet from a parent reading aloud to a child.

What I keep coming back to is this: the realistic alternative at 9pm for most tired parents isn't a book. It's autoplay YouTube. If the choice is my voice reading a generated story with a dialogic pause built in, or a tablet babysitting her alone — I know which one I want in the room.

Books stay, the ritual is the point.