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The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

theverge.com

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Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#81

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #8

It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy…

This place sure lost interest in meritocracy fast once mediocrity became available to everyone.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#82

Post by bccdee »

tarr11 wrote: post #33

The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this. paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis. Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the argument made in the article? Are you using a chatbot to think critically about the article, or to avoid thinking critically about your own beliefs?

> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.

Perhaps you should take a cue from these surveyees and do your own thinking.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#83

Post by gdulli »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #65
wduquette wrote: post #55

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.

Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.

The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#84

Post by fny »

> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.

I don't see how these and other sentiments are unique to Gen Z at all.

The difference I've seen is that many zoomers have given up on learning in the first place. "What's the point?"

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#85

Post by not_wyoming »

tarr11 wrote: post #33

The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this. paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis. Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

> The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.

This is only true if you assume that an AI tool is itself unbiased. I'm not sure how anyone can earnestly believe AI tools are unbiased after Grok's MechaHitler episode [0], unless they just aren't giving it much critical thought.

0 - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#86

Post by not_wyoming »

bccdee wrote: post #82
tarr11 wrote: post #33

The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this. paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis. Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the argument made in the article? Are you using a chatbot to think critically about the article, or to avoid thinking critically about your own beliefs? > At the same time, 79 percent…

I actually did this - I plugged The Verge article into Claude and got the following critique of what biases are there:

> The article accurately cites real Gallup data but selectively omits findings that complicate its "backlash" narrative — most notably that curiosity is Gen Z's single most common emotion toward AI, and that daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest. The 79% "laziness" concern and declining hope figures are presented as evidence of generational rejection, when the researchers themselves describe what they found as "deep ambivalence." *In short, the article uses real numbers to tell a cleaner, more oppositional story than the underlying polling actually supports.*

Then I then put that Claude critique back into Claude and asked it to analyze the critique for bias and agendas and got this:

> The critique accurately catches real flaws in The Verge article — particularly the omission of "curiosity" as Gen Z's top emotion and the failure to distinguish between heavy users (who are more positive) and non-users (who drive most of the negativity). However, *the critique has its own directional bias, consistently framing every correction in ways that soften the negative trend, while ignoring data that cuts the other way — like the sharp positivity decline even among daily users, and the near-majority of Gen Z workers who see AI as a net negative in the workplace. *Both pieces are selectively using the same real data to tell opposite stories; the Gallup findings themselves are more nuanced and more negative than the critique allows.*

So according to Claude, Claude is biased in how it describes The Verge as biased.

LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#87

Post by [deleted] »

School-Cotton wrote: post #79
john_strinlai wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am sorry, i was trying to take you seriously, but you completely lose me at comparing an llm to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and suggesting possession of an llm should be met with similarly long prison sentences. that is absurd. a central tenet of justice is that the punishment fits the crime. for CSAM, it is obvious why extremely long prison sentences are fitting. the damage CSAM causes is immense and hard t…

Punishment is not only tied to the harm done by the crime, it’s also tied to difficulty of enforcement. For laws that are relatively easy to break without getting caught, you need severe penalties or everyone will just ignore them.

[deleted]

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#88

Post by salawat »

jitler wrote: post #53
fluidfortune wrote: post #3

The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field. Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth. The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion. Rather, embrace it. Own it. WEAPONIZE I…

> WEAPONIZE IT. The moment you start doing this at any scale, the companies will notice, and after a few winks, nods, and campaign donations, you will not be able to use it anymore.

This is why local weights are the way to go if you want to embrace the technology and successfully weaponized it against incumbents. I'm not saying you should, mind, I've only dabbled enough to get a sense of how these things will eventually be weaponized against the public. But the unethical genesis keeps me from fully embracing it; likely much to my detriment.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#89

Post by sailfast »

I don't understand all the negativity in the education space. Ever since I read Diamond Age, the ability to interact with and interrogate works of literature, or science, or the world at large is EXTREMELY powerful for understanding.

AI can be used for good especially when you're digging into the details / nitty gritty and asking good questions.

Anything can be used in a saccharine way to take the easy way out. Why not ban Cliff Notes as well? Sure, it won't write the essay, but also you didn't read the book.

You don't have to use these tools in a lazy way. You don't have to use these tools in a way that cheats / compromises your intelligence. Building up the awareness to use them in a way that multiplies instead of subtracts is going to be the key issue for my kids, and for anybody in the workforce today.

Re: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It

#90

Post by bombcar »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #68
lesuorac wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean what is real work anyways? Like take finance where people just email broken spreadsheets around all day. If they stop doing that then farmers can't get loans to buy crops which means crops don't get planted and so on-so-forth. Certainly emailing spreadsheets doesn't seem very "real" but there's actual value in providing liquidity it's just not physically demanding. On the flip side, professional sports is very…

From the perspective of these kids real work probably involves working with your hands. I don't think we need to get too upset over what people who have yet to enter the workforce have to say about "real work". They need to be employed for a few years before they learn the lesson that almost ALL work is fake work.

My definition of real work is - can I point at something and be proud of it? It might not even be something physical (but often is) and my involvement may not be obvious (say, managing the spreadsheets for a building project), but there it is, the thing I worked on.
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