To be clear, I'm not talking great literature. I'm talking Clifford the Big Red Dog type stuff.

That said I still have a number of problems with this assertion:

It will absolutely be down, in part, to economic necessity. Amazon's platform is already dealing with a glut of shitty AI books and the key way they get ahead in rankings is being cheaper than human-created alternatives, and they can be cheaper because having an AI slop something out is way less expensive and time consuming than someone writing/illustrating a kid's book.

Moreover, our economy runs on the notion that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it at scale, and vetting your kids media is hard and annoying as a parent at the best of times: if you come home from working your second job and are ready to collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious meal for your child and set them up with insightful, interesting media? No you're going to heat up chicken nuggets and put them in front of the iPad. That's not good, but like, what do you expect poor parents to do here? Invent more time in the day so they can better raise their child while they're in the societal fuckbarrel?

And yes, before it goes into that direction, yes this is all down to the choices of these parents, both to have children they don't really have the resources to raise (though recent changes to US law complicates that choice but that's a whole other can of worms) and them not taking the time to do it and all the rest, yes, all of these parents could and arguably should be making better choices. But ALSO, I do not see how it is a positive for our society to let people be fucked over like this constantly. What do we GAIN from this? As far as I can tell, the only people who gain anything from the exhausted-lower-classes-industrial-complex are the same rich assholes who gain from everything else being terrible, and I dunno, maybe they could just take one for the team? Maybe we build a society focused on helping people instead of giving the rich yet another leg up they don't need?

This is what I mean by "complicated factors of culture and habit." An iPad costs more than an assortment of paper books. Frozen chicken nuggets cost more than basic ingredients. But the iPad and nuggets are faster and more convenient. The kids-get-iPad-and-nuggets habit is popular with middle-income American families too, not just poor families where parents work two jobs. The economic explanation is too reductive.

I'm not trying to say that this is the "fault" of parents or of anyone in particular. When the iPad came out I doubt that Apple engineers or executives thought "now parents can spend less time engaging with children" or that parents thought of it as "a way to keep the kids quiet while I browse Pinterest" but here we are.

Is it too much to ask for a hint of caution with regard to our most vulnerable populations brains?

Circa 2020 a huge number of fed-up good-intentioned engineers and designers quit. It had no effect, at all.

To be clear: I am not saying that engineers need to be better at preventing this stuff. I am saying regulators need to demand that companies be careful, and study how this stuff is going to affect people, not just yeet it into the culture and see what happens.