YouTube Creators Find a New Consumer for AI Slop: Babies
As younger children spend more time on the platform, concern is growing that their brains are being shaped by AI-generated videos purporting to be educational.
Monique Hinton rubbed her fingers together in one of her recent YouTube videos, signaling to her million-plus followers on the platform that she had a moneymaking business idea for them. She first asked ChatGPT to spit out “simple, repetitive” children’s song lyrics with “playful nonsense words like ‘la la,’ ‘na na’ or ‘clap clap,’” then plugged the results into a separate artificial intelligence video generator. Minutes later, the tool had packaged it all into a colorful, animated reel of smiling children, animals and shapes jumping in a circle and dancing on a stage surrounded by butterflies, balloons, rainbow swirls, sparkling fireworks, flashing lights, floating musical notes and falling confetti.
Using this technique to churn out lucrative content aimed at 1- to 3-year-olds on YouTube was a way to make hundreds of dollars a day, said Hinton, whose channel promises to help viewers “create freedom, prosperity and purpose” in their own life. “You only have to do about 5% of the work,” she said, “because AI did the rest.”