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.
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.
We all know this yet the ones with kids who need to do something about it don't, as a result kids are getting dumber by the year.
TV had a limited capacity to mess kids up and it largely didn't. Youtube and the internet on then other hand are in the vast majority of kids pockets with 0 restrictions.
Reading the first hand reports of what this looks like from /r/teachers will black pill you on the future quicker than any post on climate change or war.
Part of me is glad that my continuing insistence that younger generations are dumber than I was at their age is not just me being an old man mad at kids for still having the youth that he squandered. A larger part of me is terrified at the prospect of a generation being continuously microdosed with levels of garbage entertainment and misinformation that would make George Orwell nauseous.
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.
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.
I'd imagine an increasingly hostile world economy coupled with a then-looming but now beginning climate crisis might have a huge impact there.
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
Pretty sure that's every generation in relation to the next: https://arapahoelibraries.org/blogs/post/generational-blame-a-brief-history/
This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.
Some claim their videos are educational, but quality varies. It's also deeply unlikely that any of these mass-produced AI videos are being pushed out in consultation with childhood development experts...
Yeah, I laughed when I hit this bit.
Except that definition had an absence of evidence.
... What are you saying exactly? If enough people believe a word has a certain definition, then that word is given that definition, that's how language works. There is nothing stopping the word Frindle for example replacing the use of the word pen.
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.
And you get crucified by them if you bring it up.
I understand battling the pull of phones and tablets with kids is hard but you're lying to your self if you think it's going to work out ok if you give in, every other kid has one how bad could it go really?
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.
Yeah, keep them off YT and YT Kids. Jesus, the stupid brain melting human-made videos are worse enough as it is and kids love watching this shit over well-produced content. The only time I allow my kid to watch YT Kids is when I can watch too and it's on my phone. Recently she started watching a video with an anamorphic cat that was pregnant with a Zombie baby. Of course, YT is the one that offered her this content to watch anyway.
If you don't want to supervise what your kids watch, lock down their tablet or computer to only connect to streaming services you pay for. People are paid to produce this much higher quality content and then it is reviewed by people who know what should be acceptable for kids to watch. Compare this to some jackass on YouTube who can make the worst garbage imaginable, with or without the help of AI, and the YouTube algorithm is more than happy to shove it in your child's face. Which would you prefer your child to watch?
Recently she started watching a video with an anamorphic cat that was pregnant with a Zombie baby.
The... what?
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.
When I have kids I will allow them to go on the Internet, but I will teach them about where to find good content and stuff like that.
They will ultimately have to learn how to do this anyway, so its better to teach them early.
And I dont want to completely block their internet access because their classmates will have it too and it sucks to be the only one who doesnt, you just dont fit in quite as well and arent able to talk about stuff from the internet if you dont know anything about it. (I am speaking from experience)
When I was little, in such situations I was occupied either with toys or DVDs. The only difference my child would have is that DVDs would be replaced by hard drives with content I curate for them.
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.
Before tablets, parents didn't survive.
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.
Brain melting
Back in my day, we only had access to face-melting content. I fear for children of the new age.
Tsk.
Back when I was a kid, we watched hand crafted brain melting videos... On liveleak!
rotten.com has entered the chat.
This triggered me hard. More than 2 decades later I still remember that guy that did not wear a (full face) helmet…
Fuck, just see anything that the IDF ghouls are pumping out at the moment.
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.
I feel like I can still navigate through it because I did the previous levels but the difficulty is definitely higher.
We're now on level 35 and n00bs are still coming online. A kid or grandma have no shot at defeating the boss AI video or deepfake on this level, hell I don't even have a great win rate on them.
He says, on the internet.
“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
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)
Wait, what? Sounds like something that belongs to DeviantArt, not YouTube
Look up ElsaGate. Very disturbing shit.
Wasn't that AI generated?
Nope. Just the product of good old fashioned degenerate meat bags
Link to a good example of a mind melting AI made video please so I can avoid it for science?
(actually serious this time)
The Wired article OP was sourced from mentioned this channel - https://youtube.com/@Yes_Neo
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
BRAIN MELTING
Who writes these articles, right?
Anyway, where video link?
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
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.
FUD sells...
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.
Setup a Plex or Jellyfin server and put on it what you want them to watch. This is what I did and it has been a huge help.
The really old Disney stuff is loaded with canceled everything just FYI
Give them DaVinci and a camera and let them make their own
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.
But yeah, DIY is a great idea!
#Daddy I wanna watch something
man ffmpeg
As opposed to the human-made brain melting videos?
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.
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!
Oh good, more stupid moral panic, exactly what we needed.
Anything's better than Blippy
I like blippy , he's wholesome and educational. I closely monitor what my son watches on YouTube. There is a lot of weird stuff on there. Paw patrol cartoons where they are either making weird sexual faces at each other or getting hurt and dying for example.
As long as they're not watching brain-melting AI-Generated videos on Tik Tok.
Or human-generated brain melting content.
Lots of it about...