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by falsenapkin
995 days ago
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> Every AI Engineer parent we know of is already hacking together bedtime story generator apps for their kids I was looking for a gift for my toddler niece recently as a 30+ man who has never really looked for kids things before. Going over the shelves at a local shop, I found a book I had forgotten about for probably 25 years now. I teared up a bit thinking about my childhood bedroom and the nightly story time with my mom reading this among other books. When I visited my sister, she asked me to do story time with her daughter and I was clueless but happy to. I asked her to pick out a story to read and she dug into her shelves pulling out more stories I had not thought about in ages and even recognized a couple of them were the worn books from my own shelves, books that our mom had read to my sister first and likely took home from the library she worked at when they had become too worn. The book she settled on was one I was unfamiliar with (Miss Rumphius) but as I read it I realized it was describing a somewhat fictionalized version of a story known to some Mainers about how we ended up with such a population of lupines. It was surreal seeing all the illustrations of coastal Maine towns (I live in one, my sister is far from here) and then realizing the story the book was telling. I look forward to the day she's old enough that I can bring her to lupines growing out in a town like that and make that connection with her. It pains me to read quotes like the above. To think there will be kids who won't have shared human experiences of bedtime stories because their parents put them on some infinitely generating AI nonsense. Maybe I'm yelling at clouds, maybe I'm a luddite, maybe kids love and benefit from new stories every time. I dunno. I'm no child psychologist but I have noticed kids often like to consume the same thing repeatedly as well, we watched the same episode of Mickey Mouse like 4 times and then spent the rest of the day acting out a specific component of the episode. I'm trying to keep an open mind but a lot of this sounds like destruction of culture in pursuit of "new" but why? |
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i think humanity will always have some shared myths and legends that we'll all like to share and i'm certainly hoping that lives on. but there's a lot of room for net new. and you just need to see the delight in a kids' face once - when you incorporate a suggestion by them into a story, or a drawing, or literally whatever - to want to give that joy to them again and again.
theres room for net new, and room for shared history. not zero sum here.