Josh was at the end of his rope when he turned to ChatGPT for help with a parenting quandary. The 40-year-old father of two had been listening to his “super loquacious” four-year-old talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes, and he was feeling overwhelmed.
“He was not done telling the story that he wanted to tell, and I needed to do my chores, so I let him have the phone,” recalled Josh, who lives in north-west Ohio. “I thought he would finish the story and the phone would turn off.”
But when Josh returned to the living room two hours later, he found his child still happily chatting away with ChatGPT in voice mode. “The transcript is over 10k words long,” he confessed in a sheepish Reddit post. “My son thinks ChatGPT is the coolest train loving person in the world. The bar is set so high now I am never going to be able to compete with that.”
Parent here ✋
I don’t do this, and I think it’s a shame that some parents do. But I also don’t want to jump the gun and blame the parents.
Parenting is hard! Kids are burdensome! That is kind of the point.
But also, parents cannot be on 100% of the time. “Good Parenting” is a privilege for those with the capacity to not be completely exhausted by just surviving day to day with a family.
So I don’t 100% blame the parents. Sure, some parents just shouldn’t be, but you often don’t know that as a parent until it’s too late. Sometimes parents make bad decisions, but it’s usually due to external pressures.
Which brings me to who I do blame: the corporations and other orgs putting AI out there as an option for parents and kids when it really shouldn’t be.
This is like marketing cigarettes to kids.
I also blame health orgs for not standing up and yelling “this is harmful!”. At pediatric checkups, they ask questions about exercise, screen time, and other health related activities. If the answer raises a red flag you are given literature about it. The same should be true with pediatric AI use.
If you want to raise a potatoe, have at it.
When my 4 year old is rattling on, I listen. The people we love are so easily taken for granted. If some horrible shit happens, are you going to be cool about having palmed off your kid into an llm because you couldn’t be fucked.
This morning I listened to my daughter ramble about her dream where she gave a camel a pat, but then there was a nicer camel in another enclosure and it let her hug it. Every moment is gold.
I miss hanging out with kids. I don’t see myself ever becoming a parent, but I really enjoy just sitting and listening to kids natter about anything and everything.
KEEP THE CHILD AWAY FROM THE PORTABLE COMPUTER
I’m so disheartened. I’m bracing for the first news article about some terrible parent’s young child seeing a Sora AI video of their friend jumping off a building and flying away, thinking it’s real, then trying to repeat it.
It’s only one of many shitty things that could happen. Please don’t let kids play with devices without supervision.
Happened a lot in 50’s or 60’s where kids thought they were Superman and jumped off the roof of their houses.
Hot take but those who “feel overwhelmed” by their kid talking to them enough to supplant their presence with a computer, probably shouldn’t be parents?
Kids talking at length about something isn’t a new phenomenon. What did this dope think parents did before chatGPT? Just listen to the kid or ask them to tell the story another time. It’s not rocket surgery.
No shit. He could have just had the kid help him do his “chores” while continuing his story. Chores sounds like a bullshit copout to me to just get away from the kid. I never let chores take precedence over my kids. These people act like their kids are a burden/inconvenience to them. Yup, they probably shouldn’t be parents!
Especially at 4 years old. Get the kid to follow you around and “help”. You can hand em a fuckin sock to carry and it’ll keep them entertained to the moon and back. Offloading the kid to a computer reminds of the plot of Click, fast forwarding through all the wrong parts of life
Hotter take: “individual responsibility” is propaganda from the corporations that sell dangerous products and the politicians they have contracts with.
There’s nothing wrong with selling guns, the problem is people who use guns irresponsibly, say the gun companies.
There’s nothing wrong with prescribing opioids for everything, the problem is people who can’t control themselves and get themselves addicted, say the pharmaceutical companies.
And in this case, when there’s a massive propaganda campaign trying to sell AI as an educational tool and good for children, it just feels wrong to blame a parent for using an AI tool the way it was marketed for use.
We’re going to encourage you to use this dangerous tool without warning you of the risks? And if you or your children take harm from it we’re going to blame you for using it wrong? Never mind individual responsibility, what happened to corporate responsibility?
Corporate responsibility is likely never going to happen unfortunately, so long as those currently in power continue to consolidate it. Unless one or more of them suffer actual consequences for their negligence, we’re just going to keep seeing more of the same.
A populace that is informed of how and why these corporations weasel around punishments is key to responsible decision making. Unfortunately, we don’t have that yet either.
The trick is to keep talking about corporate responsibility - and so making people aware of how corporations avoid it, and normalizing the idea that corporations have responsibility - instead of dismissing it with discouraging phrases like “it’ll never happen”.
Hope is hard. That’s why it’s so important.
Hell yes they are wrong. Playing with the lying machine while people are in their most formative years is bound to cause mental & social insufficiencies.
And it’s not even lying, lying requires an understanding of the truth which they don’t have. LLMs string together bullshit that happens to sound reasonable at first glance.
Set aside the inherent problems with ai and just observe the parental actions here.
You kid is telling a story to you its parent. You can tell it your to tired/overwhelmed to listen or ask to Finnish it another time.
At what point is it ok to just abruptly replace your presence with someone else.
Imagine if someone did that to you, in the middle of conversation they just leave and tell you to finnish the end of it to someone else who was previously not involved. Its rude for adults but psychologically harmfull to a child still learning what conversation is.
Also, 2 hours alone at 4yo?
Also, the kid is just rambling on about Thomas the Tank Engine, how complex can the convo even be? It’s like the same shit that ever happens in that show. You really can’t just half listen to the kid talk about the train show while you fold laundry or whatever? Like come on man.
The second episode of TtTE famously shows The Fat Controller bricking up a tunnel with one of the engines inside because he didn’t want to come out in the rain.
No way a ChatGPt conversation about that could go into dark places.
Agree that’s rude to the child and teaches a bad lesson. Dishonesty in general is just bad parenting.
But, I do want you say, totally normal up leave (some) kids alone for two hours. Their behavior is pretty predictable and you may have to clean up a mess but it’s generally fine (ideally in earshot). Just don’t leave any major hazards lying around, like Daddy’s bleach IV.
It’s one thing to leave them in their room playing with the toys in there. He left him to play with an intellectual set of knives.
God knows what direction that ChatGPT conversation could have gone.
Probably better for them to Swedish it
What, nobody’s kids Norwegian anymore?
Statistically, only a small amount of children these days are Norwegian.
My 4 year old son can easilly play with sticks in the back yard for 2 hours. He can use the toilet and get snacks and water without help.
But some days he wants my attention all day long
Maybe i am just paranoid then but i always instinctively check in periodically, just in case.
Well yea I dont think I would go that long without checking on him.
Maybe, idk
Was not expecting to get another reason to dislike Grimes specifically when going into this article.
But man, we’re so fucking cooked.
We already have a problem with people acting online like they don’t understand that they’re interacting with real people and we’re bringing chat bots into it? The kids growing up using this shit now are so fucked.
If I have a kid they’re not getting a damn phone or a tablet until they’re in their teens. They’ll have access to plenty of tech beyond that, they don’t need that shit that young.
Kids that grow up with shit that parent are freaking out about, tend to handle and understand shit much better than said parent will.
Yes. Yes they are wrong, just like it was wrong to introduce them to Alexa at age 4 or gacha tablet games at age 4. This keeps coming up.
It doesn’t stop parents from using them, unfortunately, as they generally lack the support circles that humans naturally should have (e.g. “it takes a village”). Being the single caregiver to a child or children is itself an unnatural condition we’re not evolved to cope with and an AI decoy is going to look mighty attractive when there’s no reinforcements to give you reprieve.
“Are they wrong?” Rare counter example of Betteridge’s law of headlines.
Not only are they wrong, they’re fucking stupid too.
Yes. And letting adults use it that don’t understand what it truly is, how it works, how it can go off on tangents, how it can be completely wrong, how it can just make shit up, and still take everything it spits out as definitive truth …. is also wrong.
Oh no. And good luck explaining what an LLM is to a 4 year old. Most adults don’t get it. And don’t understand how these responses come into existence and what it can and cannot do.
I understand why parents are tired, but it’s super unfortunate to replace human interaction with something else. And it’s very different from how old people grew up. Back in the day they played with a stick. Or exercised their own creativity instead of getting it laid out for them. Now there’s an immediate answer to every question and entertainment on a whim. But I’m fairly sure this is inevitably going to clash with the real world.
As someone from the first generation that grew up with phones and social networks in school, it will absolutely have a disastrous effect.
I can compare myself to people few years above me, who only got phones, social networks and short form content later in the life, and the effect is huge. I have been trying for years to get rid of PC addiction, I don’t even watch shows or use social networks other than Lemmy, but it’s still hard for me to do any kind of project because I simply don’t have the attention span and frustration tolerance.
I also spent up to 17y.o just playing games and not having any other hobbies. I did catch up on ot later, but since I never really had to spend time alone while working on something frustrating, without constant dopamine, I quickly drop projects and need someone else to work on it with me to keep me interrested. It sucks, and even after years of trying to work on it, I still haven’t even started most of what I’d want to do.
I’m lucky I didn’t have AI and at least learned to program and make games, I’m already pretty socially anxious, but it’s not that bad. If I also had AI during all this, that would summarize or write every text I read/write longer than a paragraph, I can only imagine how worse off I’d be. It’s extremely teryfiing.
And no, it’s not ADHD, meds don’t help, I had a therapy for a few years. It has pretty much the same symptoms, but it’s extremely multiplied by the computer and short-form content. It’s basically a “learned ADHD” as in not biological but phsychological, and it sucks. It is only anecdotal, but I believe that a lot of people with adhd are simply in the similar situation as I am, engineered by corporations to only be able to pay attention to their content en masse.
Thanks for sharing your perspective! Guess I’m a bit older than you. I was roughly in 7th grade when phones that fit in jeans pockets became a thing and affordable enough for people to buy them. We had a computer at home, and I started tinkering with that in elementary school already. But I guess that was a wildly different experience and we had to learn a lot to do tasks that are one click these days. Like write and print a letter. Or run a game, or make it output sound. Of course there was no internet when I was in elementary school. My dad bought a modem for dial-up internet a bit later.
I guess the attention span thing and frustration tolerance are a big issue. I can’t say my attention is normal either, but I guess I’m fine. And “internet addiction” is a thing for everyone. I’m not sure how that compares, but I think everyone is susceptible to that and I’ve seen it in varous age groups. Excessive use, doomscrolling, getting lost in gaming and Instagram’s short and constant dopamine hits.
Not sure if I have a solution, though. I mean there are things that seem clearly super harmful, like AI or doomscrolling for toddlers. But maybe we should finally tackle social media and the attention economy as well, I think that’s the cause for a lot of societal and individual issues, and not really healthy the way it exploits psychology.
I think it’s worth kids getting some experience with AI in a supervised environment so that they can learn the limitations of it.
Hiding AI until they discover it on their own will cause the same type of harm as abstinence only sex education.
To abuse the analogy further, giving AI to your child is the equivalent of hiring a prostitute instead of teaching sex ed. You’re causing the exact harm that education is supposed to prevent.
