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AI children's books, body horror edition

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41–50 of 83 posts

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#41

The concept of consuming AI generated content for children has always baffled me. We collectively have a virtually infinite collection of already existing hand crafted quality content filtered over the years in the form of children stories and tales that we can pick and chose from to read to our children. We love telling stories especially to our children. Why would ANYONE be enticed by the idea of using AI to genera…

> We love telling stories especially to our children.

And, for a large number of parents, "we" love sitting our children down in front a screen and letting it be their primary source of entertainment before they can even utter one word.

I'd bet that the majority of parents feeding their children AI slop don't even know it's AI slop because they couldn't identify it as such...even if they even cared to, which most of them don't.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

keeping on theme: Tomi Ungerer, moon man https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Man-Tomi-Ungerer/dp/0714855987

Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Moon ( with bonus book ban credentials: From the time of its publication in 1947 until 1972, the book was "banned" by the New York Public Library due to the then-head children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore's hatred of the book. According to children's literature expert Betsy Bird, Moore criticized Goodnight Moon due to the fact that she bel…

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Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#46

The concept of consuming AI generated content for children has always baffled me. We collectively have a virtually infinite collection of already existing hand crafted quality content filtered over the years in the form of children stories and tales that we can pick and chose from to read to our children. We love telling stories especially to our children. Why would ANYONE be enticed by the idea of using AI to genera…

While I agree with your main point, this isn't exactly true. The quality content in children's media does NOT survive through the ages. There are so many other incentives in children's publishing that quality for children is but one signal among many. Like how a parent will buy a book that teaches a 'good lesson' as a proxy for a good book, which is harder to determine. On top of that, there are systems at play that…

Sturgeon’s law is absolutely true. Just look at the religious ideas and worldviews children have been taught for thousands of years, and at the hatred, wars, massacres, and slavery religion has brought into the world. Modern dictatorships like North Korea and China also subject children to carefully engineered indoctrination. I think modern AI, and future AI guided by humans, can do much better than Sturgeon’s law would suggest.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#48

The concept of consuming AI generated content for children has always baffled me. We collectively have a virtually infinite collection of already existing hand crafted quality content filtered over the years in the form of children stories and tales that we can pick and chose from to read to our children. We love telling stories especially to our children. Why would ANYONE be enticed by the idea of using AI to genera…

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/classrev/kipling.ht...

I think the history of children's literature may be shorter than you think.

Re: AI children's books, body horror edition

#50
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your main point, this isn't exactly true. The quality content in children's media does NOT survive through the ages. There are so many other incentives in children's publishing that quality for children is but one signal among many. Like how a parent will buy a book that teaches a 'good lesson' as a proxy for a good book, which is harder to determine. On top of that, there are systems at play that…

Look, you get the hungry caterpillar, and you get fifty gallons of slop (AI or human, does it really matter?) Anyway, check out the caterpillar for the fifty-seventh time.

> AI or human, does it really matter?

Yeah, it really does.

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