It’s frustrating to the point that I have considered inserting grammatical errors, but that would go against my principles, which I have attempted to inculcate in my children. Yes, a significant amount of what’s posted is copied and pasted AI slop. But what in the world preceded this? Barely legible slop? I would much rather have someone craft their thoughts, run them through their preferred model, and write something coherent that is not marred by punctuation or basic elementary grammar errors. And you know what, the hell with the AI slop police. Yes, if we choose to use em dashes, we will.
Yes! The reflexive “must be LLM generated” is becoming ridiculous. Anything that includes proper punctuation and, god forbid, em dashes which I’ve used all my life must be suspect. The “it’s not x, it’s y” construction predates LLMs. I don’t recall ever sending a text without making sure it contained no errors, and yes, many have included infrequently used vocabulary.
I’ve got this older laptop I just set up for dual boot with a Linux distro. Before installing GRUB, I stripped down Windows 11 using Chris Titus’s utility, though you can accomplish the same thing manually, as you probably know, to kill all that Microsoft telemetry garbage. Windows runs beautifully now, no lag whatsoever. Linux, on the other hand, locks up constantly. And it’s not a hardware issue. Plenty of RAM, confirmed all the drivers loaded properly. Ironic?
I think you are confusing forced exposure to something with being exposed to something by choice. I did not force my daughter to watch Bergman and Antonioni; I was interested in their movies so I saw them, and she chose to be interested in what kept me interested. That is how we get our cultural knowledge passed down through generations of parents who do not simply consume whatever algorithmically generated media is served up to them.
You are setting the problem: you have assumed that for children to be introduced to anything other than the popular culture among their peers is always oppressive. And when you narrowed my references to Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, and Antonioni down to "Red Desert," you showed either that you are being dishonest or that you really don't know what you're dismissing when you dismiss all of these directors and their works.
Her access to everything included books, music, films from different genres and time periods, and she chose which things she wanted to pursue based on the options available to her. The fact that now she does not care about the architecture of artificial intelligence does not indicate that the exposure I provided to her earlier failed her, and this is precisely what I said could happen: teenagers are making their own choices, influenced by peer pressure and social forces, and that does not make the earlier exposure I gave her invalid or mean I should have given her an iPad at the age of 5 and called it autonomy. I’m not writing off her curiosity, which you would see had you read all the way to the end of my comment.
Given your username, I am not surprised that you are weak in nuanced thinking regarding exposure versus coercion.
Kids turn 18 eventually. Unless they’re homeschooled and kept in a compound away from peers with different experiences, I’m not sure how sustainable this approach is long-term.
I say this as the father of a 17-year-old who once read 200 books per semester in elementary school, winning school and city reading awards. This year in high school, she’s read maybe a couple of short stories at most. She’s grown up surrounded by bookshelves in every room, but now she has no inclination to even glance at the spines, much less open a book.
We read aloud together every night for years, usually books well beyond her grade level, which was already advanced. I exposed her early to Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and other great directors. Now her media diet is mostly TikTok and gaming YouTube videos. Musically, she’s remained open to everything from classical to oldies, fortunately. As for technology, despite learning quite a bit of Python and JavaScript starting at 10-11, she’s currently uninterested in and actively hostile to understanding anything about AI architecture or underlying systems.
Is this a teenage phase? Maybe. I’m hoping with everything I have that it is, and that the curiosity I modeled for her will resurface eventually.
You can create the ideal environment, model the behavior you want, and do everything you can as a parent. But once kids develop autonomy and see what their peers are doing, they make their own choices. Sometimes those choices look nothing like what you hoped to cultivate.