Children's advocacy group Fairplay has organised an open letter to YouTube chief Neal Mohan and Google's Sundar Pichai asking them to stop pushing low-quality AI videos at young viewers. About 200 signatories back it, including 135 organisations such as the American Federation of Teachers, plus psychiatrists and educators.
The signers argue that this kind of generated content confuses small children about what is real, overloads them and keeps them on screens longer. One of their asks concerns labelling: YouTube only requires an AI disclosure when a video fakes a real person, event or realistic scene, so wholly invented cartoons can go unlabelled.
Fairplay's Rachel Franz, who runs its programme on keeping young children offline, said the platform is built to maximise viewing time and that its recommendations leave kids no way to avoid the material. The letter also takes aim at design habits beyond AI, such as frantic pacing, loud voices and clickbait titles.
The push followed a New York Times investigation into AI content served to toddlers, and a Kapwing study that found over a fifth of videos shown to new accounts were low-grade AI output. A year earlier YouTube had formed a coalition with about 20 children's producers, among them Pinkfong, WildBrain, The Wiggles and Cocomelon owner Moonbug, to fight low-quality kids' content. Google replied that YouTube Kids limits AI material to a few quality channels, that parents can block channels, and that labels for the Kids app are being developed.
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