Ai is brainrot because that’s what many people choose to produce with it, and it’s easy to produce brainrot at scale with AI.
But it’s hardly the only thing you can produce with it. Crap content is definitely over represented. It’s an error, though, to think that is all AI is capable of. If quality is the goal, and you are willing to invest the resources to achieve it, you can easily create very high quality work. But it’s not terribly easy. And it’s not terribly fast. It is relatively cheap, maybe 1/4 to 1/10 the cost of doing it with qualified humans. But it’s not trivial and it’s not magic. It’s a force multiplier, but the quality of the idea and the performance of the model used are very important, and good models cost money to use… about $50-100 an hour if you are really leveraging it. But you can do ten hours of work in an hour or two.
You can, but very few people do.
Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do <this thing>" and then post it up and ask why it doesn't work properly.
But then you've got things like the AI-based animation tools that Corridor Digital used to animate 3D scans of some of the crew's children's toys, to make a Toy Story-like video. It took damn near as long to do as it would have done by hand, because it all still had to be mo-capped and so on, but the results were incredible.
I guess it's similar to how just about anyone can pick up a cheapy flux-core welder and run a seagull-shit bead down a bit of metal, but a very skilled welder could do absolutely pristine work with the same crappy machine.
However, I still don't think it's a good idea to plonk small children down in front of a screen, and have a creepy AI voice read nonsense out to them. While I love the idea of working with the hallucinations of a dreaming computer, because I first read Neuromancer when I was 12 or so and grew up watching things like Blake's 7 with not one but two superintelligent talking computers, the reality is actually not really that good.
Children need people, not screens.
Yeah using ai to substitute for human attention in such a way that the child gets less interaction with people is a terrible idea.
But a digital loupe that would accurately tell you what you were looking at and do a deep dive based on your interest, things that guide interactions with the world in such away to encourage curiosity and investigation, are possible using AI and not really possible without it.
Of course you can also make ai toys that are designed to focus engagement on themselves and isolate the child from caregivers so they can spend more time on TikTok…so, there’s that.