I have young children, and from school they’ve picked up this Italian Brainrot stuff, though they don’t consume it themselves.
But it got me thinking, this is a new “talk” that parents should have with their kids. What is AI, and what are it’s dangers. I know all your friends are doing it, but that doesn’t mean you should.
I was hoping for some group think about good ways to frame and have that kind of talk for young elementary school age children. How do you even explain what new age AI is to kids?
Edit typo
I would argue that this should already have been part of your media literacy “talk” that you were having with children who have access to the Internet.
- Generative AI LLM’s spread a lot of misinformation but misinformation was already readily available on the internet before the LLM’s became so prolific.
- LLM’s allow for a much faster development and proliferation of slop, but slop was already there on the internet before LLM’s of this caliber existed.
- If your children can’t understand that the internet is not just a collection of facts then you are failing as a parent. People (including children) should know that they can’t believe everything they see on the internet, and for various reasons. This is part of teaching critical thinking skills and it should be taught at a young age.
I recently heard that some countries have media literacy as part of the curriculum in their schools and it makes for an incredibly media literate populace even in the wake of AI LLM’s being shoehorned into everything and all the slop that has become so prevalent.
You might not have the skills to teach your kid photo or video editing or such, but you have the skills to at least go “assume that the internet is lying to you and verify all sources”.
At a young age I would just teach to discern AI slop from real creativity to make savvy content choices.
