Slashdot Mirror
'Something Is Wrong On the Internet' (medium.com)
"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level," writes James Bridle. From the article: To begin: Kid's YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That's it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them. [...] What I find somewhat disturbing about the proliferation of even (relatively) normal kids videos is the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here; how to parse out the gap between human and machine. The New York Times, last week: Parents and children have flocked to Google-owned YouTube Kids since it was introduced in early 2015. The app's more than 11 million weekly viewers are drawn in by its seemingly infinite supply of clips, including those from popular shows by Disney and Nickelodeon, and the knowledge that the app is supposed to contain only child-friendly content that has been automatically filtered from the main YouTube site. But the app contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms. In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes.
quit showing your kids stuff you don't like, you are the parent and are responsible for what they consume you dink
It's almost like some one is profiting from the effects of these attacks our childrens' minds. Like some one wants people to grow up and be triggered into hyperactivity by certain cues from screaming colors and sounds.
*glances at media-driven political feud*
I wonder why???????
No, this man makes a living programmatically cutting and pasting SEO-optimized terms, and he has enough actual unwrapping video that it bypasses the AI-optimized content filters.
The only thing wrong with the Internet is that AdTech/BigData/AttentionEconomy's business model of "write a paper/get-VC-funding/get-acquihired about how to use AI to automatically select content that's safe for the target audience but doesn't involve Google hiring thousands of human beings to curate the content" involves, well, writing clever papers.
Writing clever papers about automating content detection/rating may be more fun than solving the hard AI problem, but doesn't, umm, actually solve the hard AI problem of determining when a vlogger is (a) real, (b) spamming, or (c) trolling..
Turn it off, make your kid go outside. Voila.
With Parents who demand someone else watch and monitor their child's playtime activity? Instead of playing, the parents let the kids watch video's that the parents have not even watched once? That technology is good, but REAL interactions are the BEST? Yeah, something IS wrong indeed
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Next thing you know they'll be on Slashdot and click a link to goatse!
So you are creating a Youtube site/app for Kids and are using _algorithms_ to keep the kids safe from bad content? Er, Google... how many tens of Billion dollars does your company have in its coffers? Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Perhaps the parent should explain that neither cartoons nor monsters are real.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You are comparing a toy that was designed or manufactured carelessly to youtube videos that were designed to spread perversion and corrupt our children. This is a problem.
I am not saying that parents don't need to be more careful and involved in what content their children consume, but this is a problem and needs to be resolved.
They're your kids. Not mine. And neither I, nor "the internet", nor even a school, is responsible for raising them. You are. If you cannot be assed to take care of your kids, use rubbers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Children tend to have a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. Usually they mistake unreal things for real but occasionally they mistake real things for unreal. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
However, that isn't the only problem here. There is also the problem of being exposed to and having to deal with the very idea of violence and physical harm. To you or me, we are probably desensitized to such an idea. People die every day and we know it. A child hasn't processed this kind of reality and the first time they do process it, it will be hard even if they know it is unreal. This is because, they still have to address in their minds that it can happen in reality.
The internet is like going outside it has war, killers, morons, sex, violence.
And it should stay that way, as it should reflect all humans in this planet, not just middle class parents.
The problem is ppl like you that think the internet could replace you as a parent.
What you should do is to filter what your kind kids see, by seeing it 1st. In the same way you don't send you kid alone to the cinema. And while you do that, try to make your kids to think about what they are, in order to grow a strong personality and be able to face the internet and the street and a younger age.
I think a lot of commentators are missing the point of the original article. The fact that kids might see somewhat inappropriate videos is just a symptom of the underlying problem.
The problem is that the information we see and content we view is increasingly the result of the interactions of various algorithms. You see this in the way Google inadvertently promotes conspiracy theories. The content itself starts to become more and more automated as every video or article just ends up being a reconfiguration of popular keywords. I suppose the dystopic end-game if this were in an episode of Black Mirror would have everyone completely disassociated from reality as all information they consume is simply generated and and pushed out to them by various bots interacting.
Must have been a "modern" psychologist bullshitting you like that.
I don't remember the first time I was exposed to the concept of death, but it must have been before I was 4, when I buried my dead cat with help from my grandparents. I remember having been familiar with the concept of disease (cat died because it was sick) and physical harm (chicken and pigs being slaughtered for food, for example).
At the countryside, kids are exposed to these things from start. If kids reach the age of 3-4 and are not yet exposed to reality of this kind (living things die, harm may happen to them, etc) then they're not raised well. Helicopter parenting is a plague - remember that.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Big company decides that bots are "good enough". They aren't. That's all this is. As bad as it is to sit your kids in front of the old fashioned tube, as much as you might complain about the FCC, there was pretty much zero chance that we were going to see Oscar, Big Bird, and the Count going at it in a 3-way. That's because real human adults were in charge, and were paid what they were worth. The Internet isn't broken. A bunch of greedy pigs just paid some cheap coders far less to create something much less safe, then a bunch of lazy parents sat their kids down in front of it. The results were predictable.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't remember the first time I was exposed to the concept of death, but it must have been before I was 4, when I buried my dead cat with help from my grandparents.
Yes. With your grandparents or another adult right beside you. Not some anonymous asshole from 4chan who gets off on scarring you. Context.
No other reason to do that then to get past the automated filters and mess with little kids.
Yup, some people are just plain ol' tacky assholes.
What I don't get is how people think a website that literally anyone can upload a video to is a good babysitter for their kid. I mean, you wouldn't set up a playpen in the middle of Union Station and just leave little Johnny Bastard to the wolves, would you?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Just watch the original Pinocchio... the smoking, drinking, and general adult behavior in a "kid's" show may surprise you. What's even more surprising is that few adults remember any of those things when they saw it as kids, they do remember Pinocchio made some bad choices, but mostly his nose grew when he lied, and he was a wooden puppet. Oh, and he turned into a real boy.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Parents avoid difficult conversations with their kids by claiming they are doing it to protect their children.
Mental health professionals avoid having to tell parents they are terrible at parenting by diagnosing children with ADD or Aspergers or some other intangible mental health problem and sending them home with head candy drugs so they'll stop coming back.