Google Hates Children

Google Unleashes Gemini A.I. on Kids Under 13 Years Old.

I had already written an entire post on collaboration and all sorts of other great stuff and then I read the latest Charting Gen A.I. from Graham Lovelace about Gemini A.I. being released to children. I thought Gemini added to my Google account was bad enough. I turned it off yesterday. I’m so exhausted with this bullshit we are being fed about productivity and creativity. The productivity gains are at the expense of creatives as can be seen this week in the WKRS Game company touting how their use of A.I. means less people and faster turnaround. Creativity? Google’s decision to offer Gemini to children under 13, through their parent’s portal, will do irreparable harm to a child’s creative development and their learning. Parents have been informed by Google it’s up to them to monitor their kids. Yes, let’s offer matches and kerosene to children and leave it to parents to clean up the mess. Google has provided a handy guide to generative A.I. for kids and parents—-let’s check it out….

There are definite harms and specific tragic cases where children have demonstrated they don’t understand this distinction—-they talk to their toys, why the hell would we unleash a tech that can engage with them like a human? They are kids right?

This is an outright lie. There is no understanding here about how children learn and what creative and imaginative play is. These tools are not going to supercharge cognition, they will have the opposite effect. Why are we giving up the attention of our children to software engineers and billion dollar tech platforms? A half baked technology experimenting on children during their most vulnerable developmental stages and complete silence from any government across the planet.

Here is an example of Gemini creativity in action, seems like one of the answers is a sneaker as a pizza, but whatever. This is thought-free infotainment. An actual creative activity would be to create an image for pizza delivery. But that would mean supporting research through a visual database about pizza and delivery—-and then finding a common visual overlap and drawing a variety of image solutions, for example—a bicycle wheel with spokes/pizza. But who needs the drudgery of research and discovery, and drawing something, why get out a pencil, when you can tap out some choice words.

Creator? What creator? How are you the creator of a process that you have no hand in. What kid would pick up a crayon ever again? Remember, a crayon was built for a child, it is a perfect fit between material and user with direct experience and feedback building a connection between motor skills, cognition and perception. I used to worry about colouring books and forcing kids to colour within lines, now we are messing with their cognition and attention span.

This is not an experiment we should be running on children. Even in their cheery welcome, they admit mistakes and hallucinations happen—-ok, oops. No biggie. Nothing bad can happen from a constant companion that lies and feeds you misinformation. Please, if you are a parent of a young kid—-don’t give them access. This will have a devastating effect on the imagination and the future education of kids. If you think I am exaggerating harms, please read the New York magazine story on university education and A.I. —-this is what is happening to 18–22 year olds—and we think 13 year olds and younger will have no ill effects?

This article is not just the latest moral panic, I’m lucky that the majority of my teaching is in hands on studio-based learning, so my exposure to LLM’s has been limited in teaching. The widespread use of LLM’s is doing exactly the opposite of what they purport to do, but exactly what they were designed to do—-addict the user. When we remove any form of struggle or effort from creating and generating ideas we are not developing habits to adopt new avenues of inquiry and creativity. We are being disconnected from the physical and cognitive connection we need to be fully engaged in critical thinking. We must not do this to children. Parents need to speak up.