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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Fuck AI
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I think that's a little unfair. They are not babysat, they're being distracted. And do you inspect every tablet to see if maybe the parents went to great lengths to curate suitable content and a child friendly walled garden? Not every tablet is unfiltered access to grooming chatbots.
Gotcha. Here's my experience with tech and kids. When my kids were younger I set up one machine in the house that they could use to access the internet, and on that machine I ran a reverse proxy. They each had 10 websites I would verify and whitelist. They all could access whitelisted websites as I didn't filter it down to each kid, they just all got 10 sites I would allow, and if that was a problem we could have easily discussed it and modified the number. It was just an arbitrary starting point. Now my kids were fine with it, wife and step kids weren't fine with my level of restriction but whatever. It caused some arguments but my bio kids knew that's how it was going to be at my house.
I truly feel for parents today as it is much harder to lock things down and keep on top of things like this especially as their kids get older. Maybe I just think that they should use different ways to distract them at such early ages. I definitely don't pretend to have the answers to any of this, and can only go by my prior experience and feelings about the matter.
I used to be more judgmental about this stuff too. Having little terrorists of my own has mellowed me. I do prefer a kid watching YouTube videos on a tablet over the kid throwing a temper tantrum at the cafe. All parents need a break. And I feel like if my parents had had the opportunity to let me watch sesame street on a handheld device in the 80s at a restaurant, they would have in a heartbeat. There were for sure other grownups heavily judging my folks for allowing me to play Tetris on the Gameboy in the 90s while we waited for our food! And I still managed to get a bachelor's degree.
At the same time, they thought watching too much TV wouldn't be good for you and I don't think that has turned out the way they feared. All gamers would automatically become sociopathic killers and they didn't. I do think "social" media has proven to be detrimental. But the internet is vaster than that BS. Most pacifying tablet use will not turn kids' brains into a rotting mess.
And as they get older you need to have numerous talks. The sex one, the online predator one, now the weird AI/chatbot one, the one that contextualizes pornography and other disturbing shit on the internet one. And at a certain point, maybe 16 or thereabouts, you have to let go and hope for the best. They will find all this stuff anyway. You probably did as well. I know I did. The only thing that has changed is ease of availability for most of this stuff. So that's what we need to prepare them for and then cross our fingers.
You are correct. My kids are older now and productive citizens. As a gamer myself, they always had access to the latest gaming consoles and all of my older equipment. I never had a problem with them playing as that would have been very hypocritical of me. I think my feelings about kids and tablets are the ages of these kids I see. Very young to be handed a tablet, but I guess you could argue that they won't be behind when they are forced to use tech like in class. Which is very different than when I grew up. I got an F on a paper once because I did it on a computer. Printed it on a dot matrix and the teacher accused me of cheating because I used a computer. Pissed my Dad off so much he went and bought an Atari 1027 printer which was a letter quality printer so the teacher couldn't tell that it wasn't done on a typewriter. Much different times than now where kids are required to use computers. I will be long gone by then, but it would be wild to get to look at society 50 years from now and see how things have changed.