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.”
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.