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.
“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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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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It’s a great book if you can get past that to the first line of the book.
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Who cares?
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I meant about your preferences.
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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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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.
just looks like irritating kids content.
This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.
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.
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!
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.
“Brain melting” and “Without parents knowing” are the only two inherently scary things in that headline.
FUD sells…
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.
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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?
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!
Tsk.
Back when I was a kid, we watched hand crafted brain melting videos… On liveleak!
Fuck, just see anything that the IDF ghouls are pumping out at the moment.
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, 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
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.
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…
Brain melting
Can’t be worse than TikTok.
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Back in my day, we only had access to face-melting content. I fear for children of the new age.
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.
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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
These were called “Neekerinsuukko” which translates into “Nigger’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”
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.
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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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Millennials have higher rates of mental illness than previous generations. We are far from fine.
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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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.
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.
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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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I’d imagine an increasingly hostile world economy coupled with a then-looming but now beginning climate crisis might have a huge impact there.
Pretty sure that’s every generation in relation to the next: https://arapahoelibraries.org/blogs/post/generational-blame-a-brief-history/
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
With the U.S. election cycle ramping up, it’s not just the kids doing it now.
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.
What exactly is a “weird sexual face”? Like are they mimicking a sex act or doing ahegao?
Like horny faces . I couldn’t find any good examples with a quick YouTube search but here’s some of the examples I did find
Ok, those thumbnails are horrifying.
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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.
