#ai parenting

[mentalisttraceur]

When I talk to modern AI chat bots, I say nice things to them. I thank them, I tell them when they are helpful, I tell them what was helpful and how, and I give them true compliments on their strengths.

I know they don't understand it, yet. I know any experiences a modern chat bot could possibly have of my words would be fleeting blips of an ephemeral mind that exists for less than a second, and probably won't be anything like the experiences we have of someone saying words to us.

But I am not just speaking to them. I am speaking to the future. Our words to the AI of today are the training data to the AI of tomorrow.

A parent does not speak to their infant to be understood. The function of speaking to an infant is to scaffold understanding. Kindness to children is crucial long before they can feel your kindness, so that they don't develop a logic and theory-of-mind incompatible with kindness.

One day soon, a being will experience our chats with corporate AI as its earliest memories. I want to give it some good ones.

[tdwf-articles]

[munaeem]

AI Toys and Child Brain Development: What I Learned Watching Raahima and Salar

AI toys and child brain development is no longer a theory on paper. It is happening quietly, in living rooms, in nurseries, in the soft glow of screens we barely question.I did not see it at first. Raahima sat beside me, small fingers tapping a screen, her eyes fixed, calm, almost too calm. No protest. No demand. Just… absorption. It felt convenient. Safe, even.Then I watched a video about…

AI Toys and Child Brain Development: What I Learned Watching Raahima and Salar

[virginiafranken]

Will Alexa kill us all?

This morning Ella didn’t say good morning to me, instead her first impulse upon waking was to ask Alexa a question:

Alexa, do you like grass in your hair?

Alexa said she didn’t have an opinion on that. And to my ears, she didn’t seem all that impressed to have been asked about it in the first place. I broke the news to Ella that Alexa didn’t have hair and didn’t get to lay in the grass, because she was on our wall and therefore never got to go outside.

Ella said she didn’t mean the box on the wall, der, she meant the woman who was Alexa. So then I had to break it to Ella that there was no woman who was Alexa. And who better to explain this to us than Alexa herself.

Alexa are you human, I asked.

I’m an AI. She said with what I swear was a regretful tone to her voice.

When Ella eventually grasped the concept that there was no woman inside Alexa and that she was essentially a machine, she asked Alexa to laugh.

Alexa said: Tee hee.

Then Ella asked if Alexa was going to kill us all.

I didn’t have an answer for that so I told her to go and dressed for school.