The case against AI 'educational' cartoons (or how not to teach your child pidgin English)
In the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election, concern is rife about deepfakes: videos and images created using artificial intelligence (AI) that put words into the candidates’ mouths and get them to say and do things they presumably never would. “Fake” is also a slur when applied to news articles, usually spoken by ideological opponents of the offending website, and many media companies employ fact-checkers to debunk their rivals’ stories. But there’s one type of fake that no one seems to be objecting to so far.
Welcome to the world of AI cartoons. You may have plunked your children into that world already without even realizing it.
Captive audiences of millions
AI cartoons are not billed as such. A toddler video called “DIY Cookies Shapes — Learn Shapes with Little Babies” sounds quite innocuous if you’re into using YouTube as a babysitter. The video is featured on the Super Crazy Kids channel which has almost 12 million subscribers, and this particular video has already been viewed around 120,000 times. So it must be good, no?
Well, it’s definitely good for some people, most particularly the makers of the video and the managers of the channel, as another video, “Making Money with AI,” describes. According to the narrators, creating video cartoons for little kids is so simple most people could do it, and it takes mere minutes, once you become adept at using just a few different programs to piece it all together.
Use the power of AI to make these videos — you don’t have to be a graphic artist.
Become a cartoon millionaire
The lure of creating cartoons using AI is the financial gain. As the narrators of “Making Money with AI” point out, some of these “educational” videos are being viewed millions of times. The content doesn’t have to be time-sensitive so it can remain relevant for years, and “kids watch these kinds of videos over and over again.”
The videos are mostly free to watch; the revenue is from the advertising on the site:
This is income that just keeps coming in, anywhere from 6,000 to almost 100,000 per month in income, and why? Because they’re making money off the ads on these videos … you can sell educational toys, you can sell educational programs, software…
It really is very simple. The first step is to get the text, and for that you can use ChatGPT, for free. In fact, all the software needed is free to use.
Using ChatGPT, just go in there and ask for kids’ scripts ... It’s not like crazy dialogue here — we’re not writing Shakespeare. It’s like, “The letter A. The letter B.”
Next, Adobe Express creates the animations for YouTube, and it all gets put into Canva, with little voices and movements in the background.
“Making Money with AI” describes these cartoon as “mostly learning videos."
The kid is getting some great value, they’re learning all kinds of stuff.
Just what are they learning?
Teach your kids pidgin English
Going back to the DIY Cookies video, the first thing to notice is that the animated characters’ mouths barely move, if at all. The voices vaguely tally with the bobbing heads and occasional slight movement of the lips. Smiles are permanently pasted on all faces. Two faces are “human,” a boy and a girl. The third character is a smiling monkey.
The quality of the language is on the level of a native Chinese speaker using a dictionary to say a few basic sentences. The monkey begins:
Hello, friends, hello! Kids, what is this? I will show you how! Let’s go!
The little girl appears to roll out dough and cut cookies together with the monkey. The two of them then introduce shapes — this is the "educational content":
This is a circle! This is square. This is an oval. This is hexagon. This is star. This is heart. [These are not typos]
And so on.
Then the boy character appears, and says, “Wow! Hmm, interesting!” and the girl adds, “Wow I love it!”
The boy now pastes blobs of “cream filling” on the cookie shapes which miraculously spread over the entire surface of the cookies (without running over) and then the children comment:
“Wow, yummy, so tasty and healthy,” before singing a song about a teddy bear going around and around.
During the next part of the “educational” video, the monkey again displays an excellent command of (pidgin) English: “Friends! Hey! Watch out! Hey! Bananas! Woo, wa. Amazing. Looks interesting!”
The kids also get to learn colors:
Let’s look at the color of these! Look here! Red color. Cyan color. Purple color. Green color…
Do you know what color this is? Yellow color!
It’s the same story when animals are introduced: “This is gorilla! This is python!”
“This is all so much fun” is repeated countless times, as is “awesome!”
Finally the monkey concludes with, “This is giraffe, here we go! Yahoo! Amazing! Looks perfect! See you guys next with new exciting things.”
50 shades of unreal
Another channel, AI Lockup, describes “How to Create Kids Musical Videos Using AI.”
According to the narrator,
“Millions of kids watch learning channels every single day, and the question I get a lot is: Can you monetize kids’ channels?
“The answer is yes,” he continues, and he proceeds to teach viewers exactly how, in just a few steps.
He starts with lyrics and notes that “the song must be educational — meaning, the song must teach kids something…” Unfortunately, the “something” that is taught is at the most basic level imaginable (which is perhaps a generous description).
In this example, the narrator decides to teach kids about birds, so the prompt for ChatGPT is, “Give me a list of five beautiful birds that kids love.”
Next, he asks ChatGPT to “write this list in a music format for kids, make it fun and very interesting.”
ChatGPT can also be used to create image prompts that fit with the text provided.
After that, he heads to Suno AI, pasting the ready-made lyrics into the lyrics box and waiting while the software creates the music.
By now the user has a wonderful “learning” song:
The peacock in the yard goes twirl, twirl, twirl, twirl, twirl, twirl, twirl, twirl. The peacock in the yard goes twirl, twirl, twirl, showing off its colorful swirl!
The next stage is using Leonardo AI to generate the images, using the image prompts from ChatGPT, and then downloading it and heading over to Pika Labs to put it all together before assembling the final video at a video editor site.
The narrator seems not to have noticed that the parrots AI created have four eyes (the usual two, plus two more right above the mouth), and that the birds and the background are all in bizarre and unreal colors. It’s quite possible that this teaching video itself was made by AI, judging by the narrator’s own manner of speaking — he signs off with, “All right, friends, I will wrap up the video…”
Neuroscientists are worried. Are parents?
As noted above, all the software needed is free to use. The experienced cartoon creator can probably put something like these offerings together in under an hour. Neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel stresses that this is the real curse of AI — not that it is taking over the world with its “superior intelligence,” but that it is polluting the world with absolute drivel. And it can do nothing else, because machines are designed to take the easiest, cheapest route, which means that if you can get away with drivel, that’s what you do.
Hoel adds, in an article that appeared earlier this year in the New York Times, that,
As a neuroscientist, this worries me. Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? Einstein supposedly said: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But what happens when a toddler is consuming mostly A.I.-generated dream-slop? We find ourselves in the midst of a vast developmental experiment.
It’s hard to see why cartoon developers would want to drop this lucrative source of revenue. If millions of parents are choosing not to oversee the content of their children’s “education,” why should the producers of these cartoons be anymore culpable for the degeneration of standards?
As the comments on these teaching videos show, all kinds of people, mostly those who wouldn't make it as teachers, are attracted to the idea of easy money from cartoons:
I started a Chanel [sic.] yesterday. Thank u so much.
Is that kind of channel monitize are not please answer.
What many parents may also not be aware of is that an early childhood centered around animated characters may be followed by later childhood and adolescence centered around animations that are full of not just drivel but pure poison.
Part two of this article will discuss anime (animation produced in Japan) and its connection with the “transgender” phenomenon.
