241–250 of 461 posts
Yay.
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Thanks for posting this article and it is indeed disturbing. It looks like there is just an insane amount of mind scrambling content that nobody should let themselves or their children experience. Given the Medium author's informal but useful initial analysis, this seems like a ripe topic for a formal psychological and technological analysis by some poor dissertation student or group of students who could survive the…
I'm reading the article and trying to figure out exactly where the horrible "mind scrambling" is happening. The article seems to say "back when I was a kid, my parent entertained me with contentless saccharine trip from sources we trusted (Disney et al) but now contentless saccharine trip is autogenerated (duh duh duh) and who knows what effect that is going to have on 'developing brains'" And would suspect, contrawi…
You know how machine translation is often hilarious when it produces word combinations that wouldn't even _occur_ to a normal humanmind? We think it's funny because we're _aware_ of the difference between normal word sequences and word salad. Small children are not aware of the ways in which these algorithmically-generated videos are, well, weird. Who knows how children's minds react to these supernormal stimuli?
We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen. Then these weird videos started showing up. We took youtube away for exactly these videos that are mentioned in this link. These are targeting children and it's sick.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being some ML grad student's channel who was playing around with generating audiovisual content. If it started getting picked up by big algorithms and making money... Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few millio…
I think the real issue is that online advertising platforms are allowing this to happen and charging advertisers for it (even though these views/clicks are often not valid – whether they're people who click a fake 'Download' by mistake or kids under 13).
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There's a lot of articles on this, the belief is that children crave predictability so they re-watch movies to the point that they can predict everything that will happen. https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/kids-and-movi...
Adults crave predictability too; they've just seen enough stuff to be able to predict most of the things one encounters out in society. But watch a YouTube video of a magic trick, and you'll likely click back and re-watch the critical moment a few times before you've even realized what you're doing. Even if you don't end up understanding what happens, your brain inherently wants to make sure you are entirely clear on…
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Whereas in my jurisdiction (USA), corporate media conglomerates employ PhD trained child psychologists who research the exact pattern and timing of flashes and other stimuli to catch an iron grip on a child's attention. Our children do not stand a chance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw
>Our children do not stand a chance. They do but it requires the parents ban any and all media with advertising.
I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me. I was exposed to tons of super-weird stuff on TV an the internet (adult swim, fat-pie, etc) and so were most of my friends growing up. I don't think it was problematic for any of us. When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off. Our society really doesn't give kids any credit for…
I don't care that the content is violent per se. Whatever. We're robust against that. What I do care about is how the content is inhuman and engagement-optimized. We, as humans, are as defenseless against that sort of thing as the Dodo was to hunters.
So, when tech giants fire employees en masse and talk about Basic Income as the answer because they don't want to be held responsible, you get people churning out this kind of shit to make a few bucks because you can no longer get an honest wage for honest work. Yay.
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I'm reading the article and trying to figure out exactly where the horrible "mind scrambling" is happening. The article seems to say "back when I was a kid, my parent entertained me with contentless saccharine trip from sources we trusted (Disney et al) but now contentless saccharine trip is autogenerated (duh duh duh) and who knows what effect that is going to have on 'developing brains'" And would suspect, contrawi…
Isn't it possible that autogenerated saccharine trips might be even sweeter than anything a human mind might generate? You know how machine translation is often hilarious when it produces word combinations that wouldn't even _occur_ to a normal humanmind? We think it's funny because we're _aware_ of the difference between normal word sequences and word salad. Small children are not aware of the ways in which these al…
It seems unlikely.
Autogeneration is done for quality but for quantity. Humans have been crafting "high" and "low" brow content for a while and while I might call low brow content trash, I recognize very specific talents and strategies go into things like horrible jingles, it seems unlikely the marketeer could make something with more of qualities they're after just by accident.
When I was young, quite a long time ago, guns and military toys were huge - obviously that implied violence and it all went into my brain.
I would expect that the extreme flexibility of a child's brain would tend to allow them to select between the huge variety of things they're exposed to. And thus I'd suspect the worst part of modern child rearing is the things children aren't allowed to do, such as play outside in the part by themselves (insert horror stories here).
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In my jurisdiction, any and all advertisement aimed at children is illegal, full stop. It continuously amazes me that this is not the norm in the rest of the world.
Whereas in my jurisdiction (USA), corporate media conglomerates employ PhD trained child psychologists who research the exact pattern and timing of flashes and other stimuli to catch an iron grip on a child's attention. Our children do not stand a chance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw
Imagine grey market viagra emails stomping on human cukture, forever.
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Thanks for posting this article and it is indeed disturbing. It looks like there is just an insane amount of mind scrambling content that nobody should let themselves or their children experience. Given the Medium author's informal but useful initial analysis, this seems like a ripe topic for a formal psychological and technological analysis by some poor dissertation student or group of students who could survive the…
I'm reading the article and trying to figure out exactly where the horrible "mind scrambling" is happening. The article seems to say "back when I was a kid, my parent entertained me with contentless saccharine trip from sources we trusted (Disney et al) but now contentless saccharine trip is autogenerated (duh duh duh) and who knows what effect that is going to have on 'developing brains'" And would suspect, contrawi…