My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.
I think there’s 2 factors at play. 1) they grew up with technology rather than having it introduced later in life and 2) they grew up with a version that is arguably quite negative.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Those younger generation are in a really dark place right now. In many cities they will never be able to afford a house; and on top of that AI labs are now saying they will never have a job.
Effectively, they will never have a true life. They will just meander around here and there, making money whatever ways they can, surviving, and ultimately pass away from something they can’t afford to fix.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
>> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
Opposite of my experience. A few family members and their friends invited me to a discord server recently; I'll join for games some nights. They're very acutely aware of how things work. We talk a lot about how even their schoolmates don't really use social media much (at least, not the big ones) and despise AI.
I'm a fan of generated music and have run across some generated vids I like. I've seen some really creative stuff which took existing fiction and generated vid content around that. Previously, that content simply would not have been created because it would have been way too expensive. I know I'm not the only one out there who enjoys it at times.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that
Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.
Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.
What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
I actually agree with your prediction (on a longer time-scale though) but because I'm convinced it'll go the opposite, where AI begins to blend in to services people use in the background more and more, and people slowly move on and stop caring about it, both in terms of hype and doomerism.
I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
> he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
Maybe, but the slop will still be painfully visible and avoided. I don't need to be told it's AI when I see a perfectly-formatted and overly-detailed comment — I already know.
I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it will not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many points of view.
It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).
I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy. People only notice the obviously bad GenAI content but probably consume way more GenAI content than they realize.
My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.
Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content
Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.
I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult
I feel "slop" is more specifically about quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
Slop meant cheap garbage meant for mass consumption before it was used for AI. The roots are actually antisemitic. 4chan's cooking board used "goyslop" to mean fast food and other cheap consumerist foods that they claimed the illuminati or jewish conspiracy or whateve fed to non jews to keep them unhealthy. Its crazy how often 4chan's neonazi rambling are the start of so many cultural phenomena. They supported trump way before he became a serious candidate in 2016
People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.
I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.
> The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
For e.g millennials, we didn’t have internet until our teens, and the early years of the internet looked very different from the ad-infested hellscape that it is today.
Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.
The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.
> They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
You and the GP are talking about totally different things.
Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
Gives me some hope that the kids will be alright.
At least kids back then knew how to host their own TeamSpeak server ;) Clicking yourself a Discrd "server" is the easiest thing you can do.
There is undoubtedly some performative element, how big that is who knows?
If it makes you feel better, it can be rephrased as:
> Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "nobody likes AI slop" or some other half-understood meme
They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.
That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.
Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
To put just one example.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
I wonder if any movie special effects that you notice will be considered AI?
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-o...
It's been going since forever in this format, I've seen people complain about it here before but I don't really see the problem.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/pass-notes
And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.
So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?
This must be the first case of circular etymology!
I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.
I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.