AI's parent-teen knowledge gap
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Generative AI is demonstrating one of the most enduring laws in tech: Teenagers are always a lap ahead of their elders.
Why it matters: Efforts to keep kids safe from potentially harmful or dangerous technology regularly falter because adults don't understand what youngsters are actually doing.
Case in point: Many teens use generative AI tools like ChatGPT, but less than half (37%) of their parents think they do, according to a report out Tuesday from Common Sense Media.
- Another 40% are not sure whether their teens have used genAI or not.
- Almost half (49%) say they have not talked to their teens about their genAI use.
The big picture: Legislators, educators and parents today are still struggling to place appropriate boundaries around young people's use of social media, which has been at the center of many teen lives for nearly two decades.
- Now AI is racing into homes and schools faster than parents can keep up.
State of play: GenAI is creating a brand new knowledge gap between teens and adults.
- Many schools have adopted a genAI abstinence policy in the classroom — but that just means students aren't learning skills they will need in the future, Kartik Hosanagar, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told Axios.
- While there are pros and cons to using genAI in the classroom, he says, we can't just pretend it doesn't exist.
- "Whether it's high school, middle school or even higher ed, the approach to AI has been like an ostrich putting his head under the sand," Hosanagar said.
- Hosanagar allows both his classroom students and his own children to play with genAI to help them refine their thought processes. He also provides them with rules about acceptable and inappropriate uses.
Flashback: Since the advent of the personal computer, parents have misunderstood their kids' tech use — and also misinterpreted the dangers.
- Early in the 1983 film "WarGames," about a teenage hacker (Matthew Broderick), his mother (Susan Davis) says her son spends too much time at the keyboard: "You know I worry about that kid ... Sometimes I think we're all going to get electrocuted."
- The rest of the movie is about how he almost starts World War III.
- Parents and pundits have also spent years decrying violence in video games, even though the research is actually inconclusive — with many studies showing gaming can be beneficial to kids' health.
Zoom out: The arrival of every new wave of technology and media — from the internet back to television, and from movies back to the rise of the novel — has triggered a "moral panic" among experts and elders.
Big tech companies are well aware of the challenges parents have keeping up with kids.
- Meta-owned Instagram Tuesday announced sweeping changes to teen accounts, limiting them from seeing certain content and attempting to give parents more control.
- The company says this is a "business decision" and acknowledged that its new age verification settings might well encourage teens to find workarounds.
- "We are proactively trying to prevent that in a number of different ways, but it is a challenge," Instagram's head Adam Mosseri told Axios' Sara Fischer.
The bottom line: Since teens are going to use genAI no matter what, the adults around them need to understand and educate themselves and their kids about the technology's flaws and biases.
Go deeper: Teens embrace genAI, but parents are out of the loop
