CHILDREN'S YOUTUBE CHILLINGS : PARENTS ESSAY

FOUR seconds into a version of '' Old MacDonald Had a Farm '' on YouTube, an animated horse with two arms and four legs hatches from an egg.

In another video, a pink elephant, an orange flamingo and other animals appear next to letters of the alphabet, performing complicated gymnastic maneuvers and tightropes.

And in another, animals form paint being squirted into a glass of water and inexplicably grow mermaid tails.

The New York Times reviewed these clips, along with more than 1,000 other videos recommended to young children on YouTube and found that the algorithm pushes bizarre, often nonsensical, A.I. generated videos from channels claiming to teach '' toddlers '' and '' pre-schoolers '' about the alphabet and animals.

Many of the YouTube accounts producing A.I. generated videos reviewed by The Times specifically target the youngest of viewers and their parents, marketing their channels as '' educational '' as opposed to entertainment.

Creators are profiting off this content with little oversight from YouTube.

'' To me, the meaninglessness of these videos is a huge problem because they're just attention capture,'' said Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School.

'' And then the worst case is that it's so fantastical and full of attention capture that it is going to be cognitively overloading to the child.''

Dr. Radesky and others raised concerns about hyper-realistic A.I. content, especially for children who are too young to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.

McCall Booth, a developmental psychologist and researcher at Georgetown University in Washington, said the children '' may have harder time in the future identifying fake content because their mental schema had already adapted to include improbable but aesthetically realistic character actions.''

Even on YouTube Kids, which is intended to provide a more controlled digital environment for children, these kinds of. A.I. videos are easy to find.

Last summer, videos of A.I. generated animals diving into swimming pools was even a TikTok trend.

Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist and director of the Georgetown University Early Learning Project, pointed out that this pool diving video in particular contains a lot of conflicting information for young children who may have a hard time deciphering what is real.

'' The animal could be real. The pool could be real, but again, it's a mismatch between what should happen in the real world between those two things. So that is going to place a lot of this cognitive load on the child to try and map those things together,'' Dr. Barr said.

This Master Essay for Parents and Children continues. The World Students Society thanks Arijeta Lajka