I am in the waiting room at the doctor and the ~1 year old child next to me is scrolling through YouTube shorts on his mother’s phone with the mom watching along. Incredibly incoherent AI slop. Not an expert at early development, but this seems very suboptimal. I know that scrolling is not good for my reward system, but a 1-year old? At least put some random video on instead of letting the child scroll? If I was in charge at Google and was living by “don’t be evil”, I would maybe make a classifier to identify children scrolling like this and giving a reminder once in a while to suggest some alternative activities to the parent?
Something like this has been happening for at least a decade. See “Something is wrong on the internet
”. There should be enough data at this point for someone to do good studies on whether this behavior has noticeable effects later on.
Adding to that, there’s the brainrot (aka sludge) genre of TikTok and YT Shorts content, which is really weird and often AI-generated, and often has Roblox or Subway Surfer content in the background and stuff like that.
I am in the waiting room at the doctor and the ~1 year old child next to me is scrolling through YouTube shorts on his mother’s phone with the mom watching along. Incredibly incoherent AI slop. Not an expert at early development, but this seems very suboptimal. I know that scrolling is not good for my reward system, but a 1-year old? At least put some random video on instead of letting the child scroll? If I was in charge at Google and was living by “don’t be evil”, I would maybe make a classifier to identify children scrolling like this and giving a reminder once in a while to suggest some alternative activities to the parent?
Something like this has been happening for at least a decade. See “Something is wrong on the internet ”. There should be enough data at this point for someone to do good studies on whether this behavior has noticeable effects later on.
Adding to that, there’s the brainrot (aka sludge) genre of TikTok and YT Shorts content, which is really weird and often AI-generated, and often has Roblox or Subway Surfer content in the background and stuff like that.