Children’s media specialists are sounding the alarm over AI YouTube videos that are supposed to be “educational” but are harmful.
This shit has been going on before AI made it big with 5 min crafts and all the other ragebait producers. Section 230 was a mistake.
I remember another time when people learned something dangerous from a video.
Specialists should be sounding alarm about people letting their children watch youtube unattended. Even youtube kids is a dangerous shitshow.
YouTube kids is far more dangerous than regular YouTube.
How come?
No it’s not. Stop this made up non sense 🤣
Ehh. I find that regular YouTube will do a much better job at keeping on track with whatever kid stuff we put on than YouTube kids. I don’t put YouTube stuff on for the kids but my wife will throw on a bluey compilation or something when the tv is “not working” and usually it will stay on bluey related stuff. Even with the rest of the recommendations being “old fart yells about something related to open source” and “murder podcast”
My wife used to put on YouTube kids but it would just go wild. We’d start with a bluey compilation and the next thing it would autoplay would be either some show for teenagers or an ai video where the characters sound like they’re constantly having an orgasm.
My mother in law made the mistake of putting on YouTube kids a few months ago, my son wanted a specific paw patrol episode that she couldn’t find on whatever streaming service they use so she put it on YouTube. She said she put it on, went to do some dishes and a little bit later heard someone talking about beating and/or killing their parents.
Now all their shows are on jellyfin with an account that only has access to their library. No surprises, nothing inappropriate, my in laws can access and navigate it easily.
Heads up: If you’re looking for anything more, all of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood is on Internet Archive. My kid isn’t old enough to navigate anything like Jellyfin themselves yet, but it’s been a good calm show for when we need her to start settling down.
I did need to rename them so they’d be recognized though, which was a pain in the ass.
The *arr stack will automatically rename things in a way that Jellyfin will recognize, and they’re no more difficult to set up than Jellyfin itself. I highly recommend using them to manage your media library.
If you need to rename files, try using FileBot.
Jellyfin is a honestly pretty good solution
I miss the old Kids TV channels that were age appropriate, entertaining and educational
PBS kids is still ok, except Caillou.
This but 10 years ago for real
I hear this a lot, but you have to put it in context. It used to be you could let your kids play outside in a nice neighbourhood. Your job as a parent was to make sure they went to play in a nice neighbourhood and at the houses of decent people. You could easily keep them away from bad places physically because they were separate places. Your neighbours would also tell you if they saw your kid in a bad place or being up to no good.
The Internet destroys that concept. The good and the bad are one link away, you need constant vigilance and you have almost no help. It’s not healthy to micromanage your children’s media consumption. It’s like helicopter parents who never let their kids free. Setting this as the expectation isn’t healthy.
I mean we don’t really have a choice, but acting like it’s okay for YouTube to lure my young kids into red pill content, or weird AI nonsense is pretty weird. Why are we just accepting this reality, should we not have some control over our algorithms. It’s basically what our neighbourhood used to be. Why are we saying it’s okay for YouTube to lure kids into dangerous content, and that is every parent’s job to constantly micromanage their kids media consumption as if that’s healthy parenting? It’s SURVIVAL parenting, not healthy parenting!
We should be able to control our algorithms and help our kids control their algorithms because the solution isn’t constant fear and vigilance lest we get taken by the billionaire class and their dangerous ideology.
It’s not normal that we created a space so fundamentally unsafe for kids. Very few physical spaces are like this in real life and I think you should try to imagine what would happen if a kid walked into a “non-kid” space like a sex shop or whatever. Because it’s not let the kid have unlimited access to porn and kink while we blame the parents. It’s usually a human worker working with the kid to get back to safety (usually their parents).
a kid wanting into a sex shop isn’t going to be warped and traumatized for life. jesus.
you are looking for demons where they are none. Not to mention ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ people is going to be loaded with racism and classism. My parents thought the ‘bad kids’ were the ones who were black and brown, but had no issue with me hanging out with the white kdis who were doing vandalism and ended up with arrest records…
I never said a sex shop was going to be bad, I mostly said the opposite. I used it as an example that when a child walks into a physical space meant for adults, the community helps. When a child walks into a digital space meant for adults it’s expected their parent was watching at all times and failed.
I also completely agree with your assessment of good and bad places/neighborhoods being often used as a cover for classism and racism.
That being said there are places near here I would not let young kids play unsupervised because of the crime rate, homelessness and open drug use. There are places near here I do let kids of an appropriate age okay unsupervised because they are nice safe parks and areas even if they’re poor neighborhoods. In fact some of these I feel are safer because there are more kids playing and parents aren’t shy to tell other kids off when they misbehave like they are in “rich” neighbourhoods.
Same with people’s houses. Obviously looking for “shared values” can be a cover for racism, but I’m not a cis-white-straight-nt-male looking for a socio-normative house. I’m not looking for them to be white and rich, I’m looking for parents who care about their kids without being too helicopter-y.
I think you read my message backwards. I meant to say that physical spaces are usually safe for kids even the spaces meant to be adults only. In digital spaces we accomplished the opposite where most spaces are dangerous, even “kids spaces”. But instead of seeing this as a problem caused purposefully by the companies creating and curating these spaces to maximize profit and right wing ideology, we blame only parents for not micro managing their kids. I see digital hypervigilant supervision as a parenting survival strategy rather than a good long term solution. We need more control over our algorithms and digital spaces so that they’re safe-by-default like physical spaces are.
The Internet destroys that concept. The good and the bad are one link away, you need constant vigilance and you have almost no help. It’s not healthy to micromanage your children’s media consumption. It’s like helicopter parents who never let their kids free. Setting this as the expectation isn’t healthy.
I agree, but with all the brand recognition, corporate TOS, rules, “kids” section, design, beeping off swear words and restrictions on YouTube it gives most parents the appearance to be a save place.
I don’t really understand your point here. I have to micromanage my kid’s media consumption because on YouTube it’s Google’s algorithm and my kid is not their customer.
The point is paranoia and fear that the ‘bad people’ will hurt your kids.
Same stupid crap that you can’t let your kids play on your lawn because there are always pedos in white vans patrolling trying to kidnap your kids.
People live in fear of the fictional scenarios in their heads, rather than just doing pragmatic stuff like being involved with their kids.
Don’t let your kid binge media without safe guards. It ain’t that hard and it’s literally your job
Literally this, our daughter watches YouTube kids and we constantly block shitty channels that come up. Raising your kids properly means actually paying attention to what they’re doing :)
- Get a laptop with a disc drive. Do not enter a WiFi password into the laptop.
- Get a library card.
- Get an HDMI cable.
- Check out DVDs at the library.
- Play them at home.
Ta da. 🎉 You have a way to entertain your kids, a reason to take them to the library, and a way to control what they’re watching.
This will work for maybe 2 years, until all the corporate kid shows lay off their writers and replace them with AI
We still have around 80 years of media to go through 🥲
Why not get a dvd player? Simplify the whole setup, and I bet you’ll spend less money.
DVD players don’t have Handbrake, VLC, and 2 TB of storage. 😉
Are there no mobile apps available with human-curated collections of children’s videos?
YouTube is not going to be a place where you’re going to have any reliable quality control. It’s literally (by design) videos uploaded by anyone on the Internet. That’s not by itself a problem, but the idea that it’s a good way to keep very small children entertained is definitely not one I would agree with.
Libby will let you check out library books with your local library card. But they’ve started trying to replace their remote librarians with chatbots.
Ok, books might not be what you want for children who can’t read yet though. 😉
Did you know you can check out DVDs too? Some libraries will let you borrow digital movies too.
Whats the hdmi cable for
Hooking up the laptop to the TV. Gives it that authentic Saturday Morning Cartoon experience.
What do you expect when the AI is trained on reddit posts?
and reddit explicitly thought it was funny to make shit up to mislead the LLMs
What do you expect when the AI is an AI*
I hate how AI Videos look.
It gives a nice perspective into how generic 3d cartoons came to look. It’d eventually cause a backwards association of everything Disney-alike with a slop.
Has Disney seen these cars?
Artificial disintelligence
