Machines aren’t ready to babysit our children
A piece in the New York Times and an excellent article on Medium by James Bridle sparked a commotion surrounding YouTube Kids. It emerged that the algorithms responsible for filtering video content were allowing strange and often very inappropriate videos to slip through to YouTube Kids. These included violent take-offs of popular kids videos such as Peppa Pig and well known Marvel and Disney characters.
YouTube says that the number of these videos on the Kids service is tiny, and following the recent attention on the issue, it is doubling down on its efforts to prevent these types of videos creeping through.
Nevertheless, YouTube will continue to use algorithms to filter its content, and that means there is always a risk attached to using the service. And even as the algorithms improve, the creators of these strange and dark videos will find new ways to squirm through. It is concerning.
Bridle wrote that “we have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible”. A commenter on the article noted that human oversight isn’t impossible, just expensive in terms of time and money, adding that ultra-fast pace and ease of YouTube uploads simply wouldn’t be possible if there were human curation. That’s true. But surely, when it comes to our children, and educating and entertaining them, there is infinite value in ensuring that they are protected from the horrors of the internet? Machines are not yet ready to make the right decisions when the stakes are this high — and indeed, even if they were able to, would we want them to, in place of the guidance of a compassionate, experienced, adult human?
These are among the questions we asked ourselves as we developed kiddZtube. Ultimately, we saw that the time and cost of having human teachers hand-pick and curate content for an audience of young kids is worth it. And it is reassuring to know that a teacher has put in the effort to make sure that the content your child is watching is appropriate and educational. A human touch is invaluable. Try kiddZtube for yourself, and you’ll see what we mean.
