Kids Are Watching Brain Melting AI-Generated Videos on YouTube Without Parents Realizing

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.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.

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!

No, no, the real problem is video games... and Dungeons & Dragons... and the mall of course... and comic books... and...

Brain melting

Tsk.

Back when I was a kid, we watched hand crafted brain melting videos... On liveleak!

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.

“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

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

You ever see a YTP? There have been man-made brain melting videos on YouTube for years.

Link to a good example of a mind melting AI made video please so I can avoid it for science?

(actually serious this time)

BRAIN MELTING

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

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.

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.

"Brain melting" and "Without parents knowing" are the only two inherently scary things in that headline.

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.

As opposed to the human-made brain melting videos?

As long as they're not watching brain-melting AI-Generated videos on Tik Tok.

Oh good, more stupid moral panic, exactly what we needed.

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.

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!

Anything's better than Blippy