Can children be told stories that are better than what Amazon does? Most likely. Can children be told things that are worse than what Amazon does? Absolutely.
Should we replace all parent-child-interaction with the child talking to Alexa? Probably not. Should we replace some parents with Alexa? Absolutely.
In that case, we'd be better off societally with a "standardized configurable children educator appliance", "result from teamwork of the Great Intellectuals, Pedagogues etc". A nice, open, verifiable, verified project under the responsibility and scrutiny of good authorities.
Or you would just rely on "try the new Amzn module"?
Between a society-wide, probably state-organized committee-controlled standardized configurable children educator appliance and Amazon, yeah, I'll pick Amazon.
Not only will they delivery decades earlier, I don't want to have to open issues on some repo reporting a problem where their project told my daughter to kill herself and have some guy tell me "works for me, I don't have any children, I just use it to entertain my dog, but PR welcome". Thanks, but I'll take the Amazon product for my nonexistant children.
What about you elect to see that it may be a good idea to feed your nonexistant children with actual culture, produced by people that critics have called geniuses,
and that it will take some creative fiddling to make a cost/risk/benefit analysis prefer the automated creation of texts for pedagogic purpose by a dumb thing, as opposed to the material already available?
Because that was the point of the post just above: "The Amzn thing is not a product of prestigious vetting" - to all appearance, it is extremely far from it.
Edit: if your point is, "yes in theory but the ANN thing is realistic, in potentially playing the proxy parent in the real world" - that calls for raising the ranking of concern for the situation, with a big "wait a moment there this cannot be good". If part of the population is not fed properly, intellectually, especially in its development, it is a big global concern. Individuals in society pay all the damages that come from inadequate education and development of peers.
Oh, you meant just doing whatever it is parents have done since forever, and deliver culture to their children? Sure, I guess, if you're a good parent, and your culture isn't shit, then yes, that's certainly preferable.
If you're not a good parent or your culture isn't something your child should grow up in, I'd still prefer Amazon. Better to have mindless consumer drones (though I don't believe Amazon is good enough to make any actual programming) than another generation of ISIS.
> If part of the population is not fed properly, intellectually, especially in its development, it is a big global concern.
Let's make it simpler: if people are starving, and Amazon offers to ship them Amazon Crackers™, Amazon Water™, and Amazon VitaMix™ and what not, would you say "no, we shouldn't. If we can't provide home-cooked meals to them, then we should just consider it a global concern, but not use Amazon's mass-produced, middle-of-the-road not-really-tastes-like-anything nutrient slime"?
Because that's the alternative I see. You can get Alexa to read something to a child, or you can let that same child watch The Dancing Primary Colors And Squeaky Sounds show on the TV. Alexa is far superior to what plenty of children are currently getting with regards to parenting.
AI-generated stories also do not necessarily displace parent-child storytelling, but probably other activities with similar (non-)levels of parental involvement, such as iPad or TV time.
Should we replace all parent-child-interaction with the child talking to Alexa? Probably not. Should we replace some parents with Alexa? Absolutely.