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.”
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.