AI is coming for your children
shatterzone.substack.com
shatterzone.substack.com
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.
To be fair in the old days they were considered human scum, but the bar for that has really fallen in the last couple of decades.
the thing is, we need the other 1%, but when in absolute numbers it is small, you can still kind of find it, but imagine you have to look through 1 billion books to find one good book, it is as good as this 1% disappearing
> So books, from Blood Meridian to Hop on Pop, are in part a dialogue between writer and reader. But the machines generating these stories cannot participate in a dialogue. They’re Mechanical Turks, guessing what word comes next based on a mix of complex math and the labor of Kenyan contractors paid less than $2 an hour to make sure the responses aren’t too racist.
You cannot simply ask an AI to generate a story that carries any sort of meaning.
First, AI stories don't have to be one prompt wonders where it does everything. It can be an iterative, or curated, process guided by a person. Second, AI is perfectly capable of putting together words that carry meaning. What magic sauce do your collection of words have that an AI wouldn't? They can quite possibly be the same exact words.
Wait until the children's books become the next battle ground for misinformation/agitprop. You could sneak stuff into images too I suppose.
Many people fail to grasp the importance of single order of magnitude changes, we are about to witness multiple orders across multiple industries.
Incoming wild ride.
“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.
- Learning language structure and storytelling organization, as you say.
- Learning about the world around them. Even fictional books help with that.
- Imprinting cultural values and morals.
- Activating the child's imagination, and sparking their curiosity about the world around them.
Good children's books can hit most or even all of these points. What they read about and the pictures they see are just as impactful to them as the language learned.
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
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.
EDIT: Thank you to everyone for your answers. Much appreciated!
You can also just go flip through a few dozen at the library. You don't have to buy all your books, and you can use the library to find decent ones you might want to have around all the time. Also, just ask the librarians, like, "what's a good children's book with dinosaurs?" or whatever. Or look out for the ones they're highlighting with placement.
[FURTHER EDIT] Here's a new parents starter pack I guess, why not:
1) Suess — Hop on Pop, The Sleep Book, Horton Hears a Who!, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, The Lorax, et c. They almost all read smoothly despite all the gibberish (reading clunkily aloud is a real problem with books—I've had "easy" children's books that were hard to read aloud and "hard" books that were actually pretty easy to read aloud, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse [you can read literally anything to kids who are too young to focus well on pictures, or if they're in the bath or otherwise unable to really look at the book anyway—I'm no specialist in child development but I'd assume just hearing language-noises is all they really need, then; three-for-three remarkably-early talkers with sky-high working vocabularies before 18 months, so, dunno if that helped, but it must not have hurt, though I suspect it's mostly luck/genetics])
2) Madeline. Classic for a reason.
3) Wild About Books (reads great, lots of fun visuals; I had this damn thing memorized at one point, didn't even need to look at the text)
4) Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Book are good read-alouds that aren't picture books.
5) How the Sun Was Brought Back to the Sky — good entry in the "quest with repetitive steps and a character picked up each time" genre, which is a whole thing in picture books. See also Room on the Broom, which is also quite good and reads well. In fact, maybe prefer that one.
6) Lots of the early Golden Books that aren't licensed properties—The Little Engine that Could, et c.
7) Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel
8) The Velveteen Rabbit (beware—it'll make the room a tad dusty)
9) Mother Goose nursery rhymes, enough exposure that they won't miss references to them, at least (I suspect we're losing these as a cultural touchstone, but enough references hang around from past media that they're good to be familiar with—I'd wager what's replacing them and a bunch of other classics is Disney shit, which has overwhelmed kids' media and brain-space). Popular collections of these are readily available used, they're everywhere.
10) D'Aulaires' Norse and Greek Myths books. Read-aloud early on as they're not picture books (but they have pictures), later they can make good books for the kids to read themselves, if they're into this stuff.
There are dozens to hundreds of other good ones, but those are a decent start. You'll probably regret few or none of those purchases.
[EDIT ONCE MORE] If you want older-school but not academic-level-of-old-school versions of fairy tales (good for reasons similar to Mother Goose, above) and don't require them to be picture books, just get the first couple of Lang's color-named Fairy Books—"Blue" and "Red" cover a lot of ground. Later spinoff entries are great if you want to familiarize kids with other oft-referenced-in-Western-culture stuff like saint and knight tales—The Red Romance Book, The Red Book of Heroes, The Book of Saints and Heroes, British-tinged folk and history tales in the two "True Story" books. It's a long series and some entries pull in tales from a wide variety of non-Western cultures—you won't exhaust this series in a kid's early childhood, most likely.
- Help Me Be Good series by Joy Berry. Its 28 books, each about a particular misbehavior: stealing, cheating, lying, etc. When I was a kid, if I ever did something bad, part of my punishment was that my parents would read the book about whatever I did wrong, and we reflect on why that was wrong and what I can do better. We'd also read them not as part of punishment, which always felt better since I wasn't in trouble for anything, but also helped solidify the values.
- DK makes great books for all ages, you can't really go wrong there. I always enjoyed the Illustrated Guide to World Myths. I'll probably buy some of the illustrated history books for my kids.
- My parents put a bunch of art books about famous artists on the shelf: Davinci, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, etc.
- Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. They also make a graphic novel of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
- Dinotopia by James Gurney
There's a lot I'm leaving out but those are a good start. I'd also look for recs from mom-and-pop bookstores and your child's school if you are able.