Thoughts on using AI as a middleman in parenting | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on using AI as a middleman in parenting

Is an AI “middleman” between kids and parents helpful or just overengineering? It helped me a lot but I only used it when I had to few times a week when he was behaving. I am tlaking about TaleCraft.me

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I’m not sure what you mean by this. Are you sitting your kid down in front on a chatbot to have discussions about issues at school or do the birds and bees talk?

First you get a story or create it, you can read it to kid then you can introduce them to characters via Voice Bot with smart matched voice. Parent can put knowledge to the character to lets say mostly focus on explaining emotion controll - super important for kids and caus of a lot of problems. Thing is kids rebell by design, so getting a wizard or princess to casually channel your thougths in is working, tested on live patients :-) Obviously its not to be used all the time for everything but a usefull tool I think

I think we’ve lost a lot as a society as we’ve moved away from shared experiences. Recently I heard Weird Al say this is why he doesn’t make many songs these days. Everyone has their niche, fed by their algorithm, and there aren’t as many artists/songs that are universally known anymore. The same is true in many areas (TV is becoming a big one). Growing up, I wasn’t an N’Sync fan, but due to the monoculture, I still knew who they were and several of their bigger hits.

I think the same is true with children’s stories that teach them about life. There is a lot of value in the shared experiences to get society on the same page, and to be able to understand metaphors as an adult. I would find it quite odd if I referenced a boy crying wolf, and someone didn’t know what I was talking about because they grew up with bespoke AI stories to try to teach them that lesson. Or flip it, if they tried to reference a story from their childhood and they found out they were the only one who had ever heard it. That would feel quite isolating. I think that makes the world a less connected place, which isn’t a good direction, imo.

People can say what they will about the monoculture, and it isn’t perfect, nor should it be the only option, but I do think it has a lot of value when it comes to binding society together and helping people find common ground. That was/is the value in religion as well, a shared set of stories that can bind large groups together to teach them about the world and operate together with some harmony through shared understanding. Throwing that away in favor of AI at such a young age seems like it would be problematic at scale.

Well, The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, coincidentally, one of the stories I first recreated with TaleCraft. The coolest thing to me is refreshing what I think are dated stories from our childhood. I believe they can have a second youth in the era of generative content. I take the core of stories and mix them with others — this makes them interesting and challenging for me too. Again, AI is a tool, possibly the greatest one ever invented; it is up to us to use it to create a beautiful world for ourselves — but, as always, time will tell if our nature will prevail.

> I am tlaking about TaleCraft.me

You mean your project? If you're going to try "blackhat" marketing like this, at least do it from a different account, lol.

NOt hiding anything, just asking out of curiosity. I didint do a lot of market validation and I am in general sofware engineer dad building an app. In market for a marketing savy partner if you are looking ;-)

Just warning you - your domain will get blacklisted here on HN if you do this. It's happened to me simply for posting articles. It's a terrible feeling.

Your best bet is to join local facebook groups and post there. Even better if it's a parenting group.

Thanks a lot, the getting product to people is the hard part for any engineer I think. I will focus most on facebook and micro influencers now I think

> Thoughts about a parent finding a substitute for parenting

Well...

Well elaborate please? :-) I know AI is getting a lot of hate but it can be usefull as any tool

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