Machine-Augmented Parenting

Here’s one way to make generative AI work for you as a parent.

Augmenting human creativity isn’t (always) bleak. Rather than despair the potential use cases in healthcare or financial services which encode existing biases, traumas, dark patterns, do this activity.

Fearful children become fearful adults become susceptible to reality distortion fields and susceptible to toxic obfuscation.

IMHO, the only real solution is long-term: raise brave children.

This activity depends on the prompt, feedback loop, and editing of the output. It’s where the rubber of actual machine-augmented human creativity meets the road.

I’ve used Midjourney to brainstorm images, selecting which outputs to upscale, which to create more versions, with a 9 and 7 year old.

Then, we re-prompt the resulting output as a “simple line drawing” which we print and color together.

One way to (somewhat) safely expose kids to the weirdness of other humans is let them watch the stream of images generated in any newbie / communal Midjourney channel.

It’s a good way to spark ideas and also identify what they definitely, absolutely, do NOT like.

I feel like that’s #parenting elementary school-age kids in 2023.

I dunno what the teachers are doing during in-service training, but it should be this: getting blown up by LLM hallucinations to prep children for machine-augmented creativity.