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.
"Something is wrong on the Internet" does not immediately translate to "so let me tell you about these absolutely bizarre and potentially illegal Youtube videos."
quit showing your kids stuff you don't like, you are the parent and are responsible for what they consume you dink
If that is what happened, then please tell me the URLs, it was one of my favourite shows!
(Here is some older example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )
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???????
https://xkcd.com/386/
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.
There is a video where gentle music plays and cutesy version of my little ponies slide across the screen into a box full of cotton wool. That is the original version. Goes for about 2 minutes. Sounds like torture when described like that but the kids liked it.
Someone released a version where about 90 seconds in the box of cotton wool is replaced with a box of nails and the pony is eviscerated by them. There is also a change in the audio to a distorted "Oh Fuck". And it then goes back to the cutesy version.
No other reason to do that then to get past the automated filters and mess with little kids.
Regardless of the merits of the detailed examples, a lot of the article just struct me as saying, "If it's not from Disney you can't trust it!" Never mind your local children book authors! They may be up to something no good! CONSUME ONLY DISNEY.
On the contrary, this only strengthens my beliefs about the internet. Like all the rest of it, at the very root is some man jacking off.
... so it is OK for me to not let my kids have smart phones and for me to police their internet usage?
Because the rest of the time that supposedly makes us backward freaks.
Can you imagine the trauma stories that would come out of that office? Have you ever actually sat and watched legit children's programming? I doubt the smut-porn police would last more than a week.
Seriously though, if you replace the babysitter with a computer, your gonna get trolled. EVERY. TIME.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
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.
If YouTube would put the hosting channel into the URL I could filter based on that.
I don't know how many times I let my son watch some Etholabs video and then came back and he had clicked on another Minecraft video from someone that was... less in control of their vocabulary.
If I could have white-listed YouTube.com/Ethoslab instead of YouTube.com, I could have prevented that, but they don't include the channel in the URL so I can't.
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"?
YouTube is going nuts thought policing conservatives while this kind of garbage intended for kids gets right by? Yes, I watched some of the videos in question, and they are disturbing. I find it absolutely astounding that Google\YouTube puts human effort into censoring political material for adults, and then turns around and says it's up to adults to police the kids section. What the actual fuck?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Whitelist, not blacklist.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The Internet has been twisted and subverted from being the font of information and a vastly useful tool for humanity in general, into something driven by greed and the very worst that humanity has to offer
So... I take it you were never on Usenet?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Well, I think both the baby boomers and the GenX have gone senile so the millennials through no fault of their own are less capable to face difficulties in life.
The Han Solo story illustrates this perfectly. Lucas commented that he never expected so much outrage for changing that scene. "If people want Han Solo to be murderer (!?!?!?) then so be it".
Now wait a minute! What you say is that our children must be taught that if they have a professional murderer pointing a gun at them from 1m who has stated already that he wants to kill you (or take the money which from HS point of view is the same, if he had the money) and you have this one in a billion chance to come on top you should not take it because it is "bad" or "immoral"? What kind of retarded message is that? If I had children I would not want them to listen to senile uncle Lucas....