Kids Are Watching Brain Melting AI-Generated Videos on YouTube Without Parents Realizing
Kids Are Watching Brain Melting AI-Generated Videos on YouTube Without Parents Realizing
A new report reveals that YouTube is filling up with AI-generated kids' videos, designed to glean cash via lucrative toddler eyeballs.
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.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!
We are ALL watching brain melting AI content without realizing!!
“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
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.
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
With the U.S. election cycle ramping up, it’s not just the kids doing it now.
This title is shit. They're YouTube videos, not LSD.
As opposed to the human-made brain melting videos?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AI scammers are using generative tools to churn out bizarre and nonsensical YouTube kids' videos, a troubling Wired report reveals.
The videos are often created in a style akin to that of the addictive hit YouTube and Netflix show Cocomelon, and are very rarely marked as AI-generated.
And as Wired notes, given the ubiquity and style of the content, a busy parent might not bat an eye if this AI-spun mush — much of which is already garnering millions of views and subscribers on YouTube — were playing in the background.
It's also deeply unlikely that any of these mass-produced AI videos are being pushed out in consultation with childhood development experts, and if the goal is to make money through unmarked AI-generated fever dreams designed for consumption by media-illiterate toddlers, the "we're helping them learn!"
Per Wired, researchers like Tufts University neuroscientist Eric Hoel are concerned about how this bleak combination of garbled AI content and prolonged screentime will ultimately impact today's kids.
"All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff," the scientist recently wrote on his Substack, The Intrinsic Perspective.
The original article contains 430 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I wont ever have kids but if I did, they'd get a VHS player and some tapes until they're old enough to understand the difference between garbage content and quality content. Who knows what kind of policial ideology crap their pumping kids brains with.
Oh good, more stupid moral panic, exactly what we needed.