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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
Yes but we can’t tell if that’s caused by being online, it’s possible you’d have had the same problems anyway or possibly worse. For all we know the internet helped you deal with your issues and without it you’d have ended up a serial killer.
I think it’s less the network’s fault, and more on where someone chooses to spend their time on the network. If you’re on Facebook, it is in their interest to piss you off so you stay and fight. But plenty of other tools exist to connect folks online without being manipulative.
It’s like fire, nuclear energy, or most any other tool. Use it right and everyone benefits, use it wrong and people get hurt.
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. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9934502/
No, do not write leading statements like that, it’s rude. Just ask me to clarify.
I’m saying there’s.no point measuring millennial healthcare analytics vs older generations because millennials aren’t older yet (obviously). So point in time analytics aren’t valuable ( edit to my conversation, obviously they are useful) My point was to understand the health analytics of a cohort relative to care options, you must consider the same age band, no matter the year.
So like " describe mental health detection among 20-30 yo’s across decade’s of history"
At least those horrible things required human effort to make, so there was a limited quantity. An unlimited supply of content that a human had no part in making is completely new territory
It’s not obvious to me why the non-human origin matters here. Eventually AI will get so good that you can’t even tell the difference, or if you can, it’s because it’s so high quality.
In my mind the meat of the issue is the amount of time we spend watching that content, and less so who made it.
Non human origin matters because it’s easy to flood the field with this stuff.
If finding quality videos becomes a needle in a haystack amidst ai generated bullshit, each looking to passively earn a few bucks, overall quality of life will suffer as the ouroboros eats its tail.
These were called “Neekerinsuukko” which translates into “Nigger’s Kiss” and they were sold under that name well over into the 2000’s. It’s basically a chocolate egg with a flat waffle bottom and filled with this white creamy filling.
I’m not sure if you can actually call that “racist” candy as I don’t think whoever made it had any bad intentions behind it. It’s just the name of it that aged a little badly. Nowdays these are just called “Kisses”
Wait, are you talking about some variation of candy cigarettes that I have never seen, but would be insanely jealous if they existed, or the flavored ones Camel used to have? Cause yeah chocolate mint Camels were awesome. Never liked the orange flavored ones, but that seemed to just be me in my friend group.
My kids won’t have access to youtube (or even the internet) for as long as I can make that happen. If they absolutely MUST watch something on a screen it will be downloaded nature documentaries, episodes of Sesame Street, or maybe really old Disney animations.
I haven’t re-watched any with that in mind… I mostly just remember funky animals and singing “oh delally oh delally, golly what a day” and “oobidoo I wanna be like you-oo-oo” with my own dad.
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.
They’re generating $10,000 a month and that’s enough for them to work from a private helicopter? Something seems off… lol!
$10,000/month is $120,000/year. That’s a decent salary, but it isn’t private helicopter money. Also, how enjoyable is it to work from a helicopter anyway?
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