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.
Agree. But also Covid
The recent rise in home-schooling, and anti-intellectualism probably aren’t helping much either, especially when you see things floating about here and there about how schools are hell-bent on brainwashing your children, and you should pull them out lest they be exposed to communism and the moral degradation of society or some such.
COVID does seem to be a part of it, but not all of it, since some of the data linked in the article shows a small decline in the scores before the pandemic and lockdowns. They could well have just exacerbated the underlying issues.
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.
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 What outdated paedegogy.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‽
I have noooooo idea why. I was also amazed when I saw it. It was mostly choosing the correct colors and other rudimentary things.
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.
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.
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When I was younger I wasn’t sad because I was online, I was online because I was sad and felt out of place in reality.
The cough isn’t the cause of the cold, it’s a symptom.
Also, I gained more empathy the older I got. So you probably need a bigger data set than your own experiences.
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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.
Agreed, but we’re specifically talking about looking at depraved content on the Internet.
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.
Life is just very complex.
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.
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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"
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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.
I remember candy cigarettes. My favorite was the one that also double as gum. But guess I miss the racist candy? Or did I not get the racism?
But guess I miss the racist candy?
I don’t know it either, but I feel like when someone clarifies, I’ll be like “Oh… OHH! That.”
This one comes to mind
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These were called “Neekerinsuukko” which translates into “removed’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”
They were called chocolate babies in the 80s/90s and think they still go by that name but are no longer made by a major manufacturer
Pretty sure that’s every generation in relation to the next: https://arapahoelibraries.org/blogs/post/generational-blame-a-brief-history/
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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.
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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.
“Deeply unlikely” sounds like a stylistic mistake by a bad LLM. I’ve never heard that one.
“Highly unlikely” is the more common expression
I think I’ve heard “deeply” being used that way for a good few years now. Might have been making its way round for a while!
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.
We better adapt soon becuse the village is dead and it isn’t coming back.
For the families who can afford it, daycare is the replacement.
Where I live it’s literally cheaper to lease an electric car than it is to put a kid 5 days per week in daycare.
Actually play groups and friend networks are pretty common now
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.
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
Yes, children are truly a mystery. And very complex.
No, but parenting can be pretty complex and there is a large degree of variability child to child. The idea that you either are a psychotic helicopter parent (because there is really no other interpretation to demanding a parent be around their toddler 24/7) or simply should not have children is a gross oversimplification and also, more importantly, fuckinh prima facie dumb as shit.
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.
Weird how I managed to be a kid without tablets and my parents survived.
Weird how people didn’t need two or more full time jobs to afford a family back then too.
My parents both worked
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And look how that turned out.
If you want to sing wheels on the bus with your kids for that five hour car ride, more power to you. You’re a stronger mind than I. My kids are getting tablets.
I think it worked perfectly. I have the perfect combination of self loathing and confidence to be a high earning professional who also believes that humans are wicked and should pursue our own extinction, so as to protect our non existent children from the inevitability of human suffering. Plus, my executive functioning is barely holding on even without early age screen time.
Also it leaves me lots of time to care for them as they age. Win win.
my executive functioning is barely holding on even without early age screen time.
I had a screen since I was 6 in the 80s. An apple 2e. It turns out that screens are great for calming autistic ADHD folks. It’s why many of us end up in IT. But I’m guessing it’s why my exec function isn’t horrible. Imagine living screen free all day??
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.
Can’t be worse than TikTok.
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Tsk.
Back when I was a kid, we watched hand crafted brain melting videos… On liveleak!
rotten.com has entered the chat.
For us it was ‘faces of death’ (don’t know if this is the exact title in English, but this is what the title would be translated literally) on copied VHS tapes. Glad I was a teen already when these circled around…
Yeah I’m German, I saw them as well. There must have been at least 4, but probably way more. We got them from the Netherlands for some reason.
Yeah, in the US it was ‘Faces of Death’ as well. I remember the advertisements. Never saw it, but I saw plenty of horrific shit on rotten.com as a teen
This triggered me hard. More than 2 decades later I still remember that guy that did not wear a (full face) helmet…
Not sure I remember that particular one, but there was a lot of messed up shit I really shouldn’t have seen with 12 years.
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.
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“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
Far more worried about the ads than the AI generated videos tbh.
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It’s a great book if you can get past that to the first line of the book.
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Ok, read 50 Shades then.
The book is excellent and predictive of so much tech culture to come out shortly after.
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Who cares?
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I meant about your preferences.
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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
Wait, what? Sounds like something that belongs to DeviantArt, not YouTube
Look up ElsaGate. Very disturbing shit.
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
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.
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
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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.
It’s pretty fair quality kids stuff, nothing even close to the weirdness we used to get telletubbies, stop it and tidy up, clangers…
My brain did not melt.
Yeah tbh this kind of weird low quality kids stuff has been around on YouTube for years. My sister used to subject me to it when she was little hahah.
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.
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.
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?
BRAIN MELTING
Who writes these articles, right?
Anyway, where video link?
