from Hacker News

AI is coming for your children

by dathos on 6/21/23, 2:09 PM with 26 comments

• by alexb_ on 6/21/23, 2:45 PM

  The complete and utter disregard for any sort of ethics when it comes the "hustle" is ruining society. We've allowed and encouraged people to have a mindset that everything is okay when you are making "passive income", and instilling incredibly selfish and society-ruining values into people. Teenagers who grow up around "hustle culture" would sell their own grandmothers if it gave them $10/month passive income.

  Something needs to be done about this - laws need to be better enforced when it comes to scams, culture needs to be steered in the direction of having empathy for others, and values need to be changed such that you can make lots of money by genuinely improving the world. As of now, all of these get rich quick schemes are either non functioning or come at direct detriment to everyone else.

• by amitport on 6/21/23, 2:30 PM

  99% of human written children books are terrible. I doubt ChatGPT is worse.

• by KMnO4 on 6/21/23, 2:48 PM

  What a useless article. The hot take is buried way down near the bottom:

  “books are so incomplete and broken they might fundamentally damage the way young children acquire reading skills.”

  Then, it’s not backed up with any sources indicating this may be true.

  The reality is that it’s not. Children don’t need highly developed story arcs, or plot twists, or realistic depictions of life.

  Ultimately, the goal of learning to read is 1) understand how letters form words, 2) understand how words form sentences, 3) understand sentence structure and context, 4) understand how sentences form a story.

  AI is perfect for that. I highly encourage the author to take an hour out of their life and try to learn a language. You don’t learn Spanish by immediately starting at the Spanish translation of The Odyssey. You learn with stupid little phrases like “The cow is eating ice cream”.

  So maybe go ahead and write your next article about how Duolingo is damaging people’s ability to learn languages. It will hold as much water as this one does.

• by tqi on 6/21/23, 2:48 PM

  "They could do permanent damage to childhood literacy."

  This is fear mongering nonsense. Poorly written kids books is nothing new. The only difference now with genAI is the sheer volume, but are already way more books than could be effectively curated, so how different is it?

  "My worry here is that the parents who fall for these books are likely to be overworked, with low budgets and little free time to vet purchases." How noble of this guy to cape up for these overworked imaginary parents who are incapable of not buying crap books from the internet. After all, they are poor, so therefore obviously lack good judgement. /s

• by mdorazio on 6/21/23, 2:38 PM

  This is really "AI is coming for low-barrier content, including children's books." Which is already happening with low-effort written content and digital art in general.

• by idopmstuff on 6/21/23, 2:38 PM

  I feel like most of these "AI is going to ruin X" posts ignore the fact that there was already a tremendous amount of crap in X. Before AI, people got cheap, low-quality ghostwriters.

  Ultimately, I feel like this is going to be a very short-lived phase of AI - soon we'll be at the place where you can just tell an AI to generate a coloring book or a children's book about a topic of your choosing (personalized if you'd like) and have that sent off the printer and delivered to you. The quality will be just as good as the best stuff out there today. At some point after that, we'll get to high-quality novels.

  The AI hustle bros are going to have a limited window before AI upends their hustles - just ignore them for a couple of years, and it'll be like the never existed.

• by renewiltord on 6/21/23, 2:42 PM

  For people who are parents, how did you find good children's books? There is a lot of crap out there so there must already have been some selection mechanism.

  EDIT: Thank you to everyone for your answers. Much appreciated!