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Comment by Paria_Stark | Hacker News Reader

The concept of consuming AI generated content for children has always baffled me.

We collectively have a virtually infinite collection of already existing hand crafted quality content filtered over the years in the form of children stories and tales that we can pick and chose from to read to our children. We love telling stories especially to our children.

Why would ANYONE be enticed by the idea of using AI to generate tales when there are so many out there to tap from is really beyond my comprehension.

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While I agree with your main point, this isn't exactly true.

The quality content in children's media does NOT survive through the ages. There are so many other incentives in children's publishing that quality for children is but one signal among many. Like how a parent will buy a book that teaches a 'good lesson' as a proxy for a good book, which is harder to determine.

On top of that, there are systems at play that limit the impact of curators who really put the work in to identify good children's books. For example, a children's librarian has to buy books through the city or county procurement process. Only certain vendors will have registered as a valid supplier to the procurement team, and then they have a chokehold on what can be bought for the library, so they can offer their shovelware with larger margin, along with a few compromises about the inclusion of known-good books.

And then to add to this, the rights to publish good books are more expensive, and require more work and negotiation.

Any parents who want an example of this should check out the works of Tomi Ungerer. Really some of the best picture books ever made, and often not available to be purchased at all. Phaidon, a niche and fancy publisher finally secured some rights, and is releasing some nice editions, but you won't find them in most public libraries. And even then, some of the his best work isn't available due to complications (like The Hat, only available in anthology or used books from the 70s)

This is so apparent as a parent that loves to read. It feels like things are even worse than Sturgeon's law would make you think.

Sturgeon’s law is absolutely true. Just look at the religious ideas and worldviews children have been taught for thousands of years, and at the hatred, wars, massacres, and slavery religion has brought into the world. Modern dictatorships like North Korea and China also subject children to carefully engineered indoctrination. I think modern AI, and future AI guided by humans, can do much better than Sturgeon’s law would suggest.

Look, you get the hungry caterpillar, and you get fifty gallons of slop (AI or human, does it really matter?)

Anyway, check out the caterpillar for the fifty-seventh time.

> AI or human, does it really matter?

Yeah, it really does.

By your logic, humans shouldn't write new children's books either, because there is already enough high-quality content already.

No, because the premise resides in the fact that human care and creativity is what makes the value.

There is a mountain of human care and creativity to draw from; and nothing wrong with adding to the mountain.

But why bother with the statistical simulacra of the mountain (or raise your children on it).

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/classrev/kipling.ht...

I think the history of children's literature may be shorter than you think.

You could say that about pretty much any form of media, people just like new stuff more than old stuff. There's more 9 and 10/10 movies than most people would watch in their lifetime already but people will go see some forgettable trash movie in the theater instead.

Some of the older quality content uses language which is now considered inappropriate. Of course, it wouldn't be hard to replace those words and there are plenty of books that do, but we can't just use the older books as they were.

> We love telling stories especially to our children.

And, for a large number of parents, "we" love sitting our children down in front a screen and letting it be their primary source of entertainment before they can even utter one word.

I'd bet that the majority of parents feeding their children AI slop don't even know it's AI slop because they couldn't identify it as such...even if they even cared to, which most of them don't.

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