My baby nephew and AI
I don't have contact with small children in my daily life anymore. It's kind of a bummer honestly. I liked working with children when I was interning at a local community library back in my college days, and when I worked as a teacher at a private English course. I don't miss teaching at the school though. That shit was wild. Also I had a class full of 12-year-olds... Not the same as small children, let me tell you.
Anyways. All of that to say that lately I finally got to be around a kid again more frequently. I've had to babysit my 5-year-old nephew a few times lately—he's my cousin's son, so I guess technically my second-degree cousin, but I'm more like an aunt to him. I only see him like once or twice a year, my cousin lives in Florida with him and only comes to Brazil when Baby Nephew is on school breaks.
But something that's struck me recently is that it's kind of weird watching him grow up with AI slop.
For context, he's the son of a single mom, with my aunt (his grandma) filling the role of babysitter by herself most of the time, or at best taking turns with my madrinha (Baby Nephew's grandaunt). But they're two old ladies who can barely keep up with a boy running around the house. So whenever I'm around, it's my chore to be with him and let the old grannies rest.
But what all of that means is that he's a five-year-old surrounded by exhausted women most of the time. And even though my cousin didn't want to let him have any screen time, she eventually relented, and he got into games like Roblox and (to my shock) YouTube shorts for kids... which was a thing I didn't know existed. And, of course, he's obsessed. Like a good 5-year-old boy with a screen in front of him, he of course has no self-control and the grown-ups around him are just too exhausted to really set better boundaries.
They try to take the phone away from him only to have him in hysterics. So far, nothing really new, right? That's basically what you'll see if you sit down at any family restaurant for 15 minutes or less.
What surprised me is how little they know about simple things like... Activating screen time, set app limits, turn on screen distance, these basic 'tech self-care' stuff any smartphone offers nowadays. Actually, tomorrow I'm heading to my aunt's place (where my cousin stays with Baby Nephew when they come to Brazil) to basically teach the grown-ups how to set up these features to help with controlling his screen time on their phones.
But then here's YouTube shorts. Of all the things he does on their phones, I feel like this is the vilest of them all. The amount of AI slop being fed to this little kid through youtube's Kid Algo is... astounding. And he's a five-year-old. He doesn't understand what he's seeing is AI, doesn't matter how obvious it is. He'll talk about videos of dogs with puppies on strollers or whatever and he thinks it's real.
Like, what is that gonna to do him as he grows up? It's different from watching a cartoon or something with special effects. These are short videos whose intention is to pass as "real" or, at the very least, "realistic". And it is also different from watching a fantasy or sci-fi movie—the medium in which the shorts are being presented suggests it's part of reality. If he watches AI slop between real people talking and showing real things, he'll only assume that everything there is the same: it's all real. After all, why shouldn't he?
I don't know how that's gonna affect him in the long run. Is his perception gonna be warped? In the future, are we going to live in Opposite Day world, where old people (us) are the ones who can recognize fake from real online and young people are gonna be the gullible ones? Is he gonna do something incredibly stupid growing up because he saw a stupid AI slop video showing something absurd/dangerous/imoral and he'll try to do it himself?
I really don't know. Maybe I'm wholly overreacting. Violent video games never made us particularly violent. RPGs did not turn teens into Satan worshipers. So I truly don't know, though I'm pretty worried about what he might try to do as a little kid who doesn't know any better because he saw some crazy AI slop of flying puppies...