As opposed to the human-made brain melting videos?
Kids have been watching plenty of brain melting videos before AI came along too.
If you want kid’s brains to stay nice and firm don’t let them be raised by a tablet.
Seems a difficult these days. I saw my niece last year who was in kindergarten at the time, and she was given a tablet by her school where she did all her homework and homework related video games. She’s also recently started learning photoshop and she’s 6 now. The way humans interact with technology will always keep changing. Some bas, some good.
As an ECE worker, why the fuck is any kindergartener being given homework? What outdated paedegogy.
Shit an iPad is bad enough, but screen time can be limited and some use is fine, but homework‽
“Brain melting” and “Without parents knowing” are the only two inherently scary things in that headline.
FUD sells…
Im not a fan of AI content, but I wanna do a bit better than just old man yells at new thing. If the AI content was indistinguishable from human made there wouldnt be any outrage, how would we know? AI is distinguishable, and I think the main distinction is the lack of human goals in creating the content. AI is computer, it doesnt feel joy for creating, it doesnt have fun, it isnt trying to express itself, just mimicing expressions.
So Im watching some of these AI videos, and comparing to kids shows from before AI was a thing. It’s a lot of shared elements, and any given few seconds from the AI videos seems normal. But watching it scene to scene is bizarre. It’s really bad about continuity, and there’s no story whatsoever or any worldbuilding. Which you might not associate with kids shows, but they were present, just simplified along with everything else. Shows like Dora and Blues Clues had overarching quests for the characters every episode, a continuity of events to follow, and recurring elements to remember in the next episode. These are all good learning elements for developing brains I feel, Swiper shows up and that’s activating memories, he’s an obstacle to this continuity and needs dealing with, and how to deal with it was explained last time. The AI content Im seeing has none of this
Thats a very old generation of kids show, and they were somewhat educational.
Go back 2-3 years ago and watch the sort of mindless droll on YT, its human made but pure mindrot - zero plot, just sound effects, oddly paced scenes, bright catchy visuals, pop culture characters etc. This AI stuff cannot do any worse as we’d already turned children’s media into addictive algorithmic manipulation.
There are still plenty new children’s media options that aren’t hot garbage. Bluey, Miraculous Ladybug, and Spidey and his Amazing Friends are 3 of my son’s favorites, and all three have story arcs, characters with a bit of depth and moral fiber, and are in active production. There’s also all the PBS Kids content that values learning and modeling emotional regulation, hell even Nickelodeon has Blaze and the Monster Machine teaching kids about basic engineering concepts.
YouTube has been poison for children for over a decade, but it’s gotten progressively worse. I hesitate to judge others’ parenting, but when someone sets their 4 year old in front of an iPad with unrestricted YouTube access, it really lets you know what kind of parent they are
Im pretty sure all of that was AI too, at least algorithmic in some way. Like plugging in google trends as some twisted madlibs or something. That shit definitely wasn’t human either.
The only scary part about this is that youtube makes money off advertising to kids and that it’s so lucrative that people bother generating this dumb shit.
Automated content farms to sell ads. So basically, instead of teams of people in Russian content farms like 5 Minute Crafts siphoning money from Google, the AI does it instead.
Another reason why advertising-based economies are stupid. It’s a race to the bottom, and every single content creator has to make their content worse and worse, with more and more ads, just to break even. Fucking podcasts have automatically inserted crap now, just shoved in randomly, based on your IP when you download them.
siphoning money from Google
How does that work?
Pretty simple, actually. Content farms push as much media out as possible to get as much attention and views as they can. This generates ad revenue. Advertisers pay Google for the ads, Google pays content creators.
Oh wow. I didn’t know that.
No, no, the real problem is video games… and Dungeons & Dragons… and the mall of course… and comic books… and…
That god awful mary-wanny! That’s what’s doing it!
^(pay no attention to the THC vape in my hand, that doesn’t exist, no, it’s for “medical reasons.” That’s it!)
God, I want a THC vape. Had one once when I lost my job, apartment, roommate, etc, all at the same time.
I couldn’t afford my overpriced-yet-shitty $2,000 apartment, plus utilities, by myself on any of the jobs I found. There was nothing to do but wait for a couple of weeks for family to come pick me up, so I said screw it and got a THC vape pen. It was the most relaxing two weeks I’ve ever had.
The pen had a nice big cartridge of Charlotte’s Web. I used it A LOT. Woke up in the middle of the night at one point, still buzzed, and decided I should take a break from THC. I needed to sober up to handle adult crap, so I threw the thing away.
Proud of myself for not letting myself become and addict, even though I was high at the time. But still miss it.
Can’t be worse than pregnant Spider-Man and pregnant Hull get married to have Zelda’s baby while beating up Elsa or whatever the fuck was rotting kids brains like a decade ago
They still have weird shit like that all over kids youtube. I forbade it in my house after seeing a video of a kid literally shooting their mom in the face. Before I was just blocking entire channels but after that… yeah no youtube kids in my house.
Don’t have any of that; except that youtube keeps showing me colorfull gambling ads in the style of a farmville game… before and between kids videos.
(this happens when playing youtube via chromecast on the lounge TV; i have adblockers on my computers)
Wasn’t that AI generated?
Nope. Just the product of good old fashioned degenerate meat bags
Wait, what? Sounds like something that belongs to DeviantArt, not YouTube
Look up ElsaGate. Very disturbing shit.
When I was a kid in the early 2000’s we were vibing to a funny song about a famous pedophile, watching pictures of dead people on rotten.com and ofcourse porn on the late night tv. We also had candy resembling tobacco products as well as ones with racist names.
I think new parents especially often seem to forget all the similar things they did as a child and then apply different standards to their own kids. Yeah, it’s not optimal, but they’re probably going to grow up just fine.
Millennials have higher rates of mental illness than previous generations. We are far from fine.
Hard to believe this isn’t simply due to improved detection, reporting and treatment options.
Gen X and boomers still go to the Dr and undergo depression screenings, yet Gen X has roughly half the rates of depression as gen z and millennials. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9934502/
The key metric would be to review care detection and frequency at the same chronological age of participants, not simply today.
I’d imagine an increasingly hostile world economy coupled with a then-looming but now beginning climate crisis might have a huge impact there.
There are multiple possible explanations for that. I don’t see any direct link between the kind of content we millenials consumed in our childhood and the apparent rise in the number of mental health cases. I’d be willing to bet that the time spent consuming said content plays a much bigger factor.
My parents have been watching Brain Melting AI generated videos without me realising.
Seeing my mom watch a TTS voice read the top 6 blablabla was somewhat radicalising.
Shame on whoever pumps out this garbage.
Same except it’s some horrifying shit like “Ukranians are Nazis, Russians are liberators, the west has fallen, traditional values are being destroyed by woke-ism, gays are destroying America, stop being a low value male”, I could go on.
Watch Kyle Hill’s video on AI generated content, and the dark forest theory applies to the internet. The internet has become truly hostile today and now I seek to avoid it when I can.
He says, on the internet.
I see this as a parenting failure, honestly. You’re not supposed to just let your kid watch whatever without supervision IMHO. If you can’t control what your kids watch, don’t give them iPads!
Covid has shown me that a lot of parents shouldn’t be. During the period that everybody was stuck at home there was a large amount of people that found out that they don’t know, or want, to raise a child and couldn’t wait to get them to schools or activities just to get rid of them.
My ex used to say “you can’t be expected to give up your social life just because you have a child”. My kids and I are better off now.
“It takes a village to raise a child” is an old expression for a reason. Historically (EDIT: And today in most of the world), parents wouldn’t take care of their kids 24/7. They would have parents, siblings, neighbours and friends to help share the load.
The idea that parents and parents alone do 100% of everything to raise a child is a very modern western thing.
This is a strange take. It’s okay to be a parent that wants alone time, or time away from their kids. It’s no different than wanting time alone from any family member. It doesn’t mean you don’t love them, it means you enjoy being with yourself and fulfilling your own wishes sometimes. I have a really hard time believing anyone who says they love to be around a toddler 24/7. It’s just not humanly possible.
My solution to not wanting to be around a toddler 24/7 is to not make a toddler in the first place.
Cool. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about then!
‘I’ve never flown a helicopter but if I saw one in a tree I’d be like “you fucked up”. that’s not supposed to be up there—that’s pilot error’.
-Steve HofstetterBad metaphor tho
Supervision? All the time? Found the guy without kids.
Sure sure, you make a point. But kids are 24 god damn 7 and occasionally I need to do things like chores and cooking. They get tablets so I can survive. I did remove YouTube, but their school didn’t.
It’s funny yeah everyone knows exactly how to raise kids until they have their own.
My parents were obsessive never letting us watch anything violent, the only way you’d tell the difference between me and my buddy that watched them all is I do a little worse than most at pop culture pub quiz rounds. I really don’t think humans are as fragile as some people assume, playing on a tablet isn’t going to melt anyone’s brain.
As long as they’re not watching brain-melting AI-Generated videos on Tik Tok.
Here’s a video of a TED talk from 2018 talking about manually-generated brain-melting videos for kids. Teens and adults are watching variants of this crap now too.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.
You ever see a YTP? There have been man-made brain melting videos on YouTube for years.
I’d argue YTP are better produced than what this article is talking about. I love absurdist humor, but this article is not talking about that. I’ve seen some stupid fucking shit get offered to my child to watch and would prefer her to watch YTPs instead. She’s banned from watching YouTube kids by herself.
“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
