Comment by tavavex
2 hours ago
This feels unfalsifiable, because you could reject any coherent argument put forth by saying that they just got this from some social media platform and they don't truly think that. The modern society and system have been picked apart relentlessly, and most of the simple arguments against it are already floating all over the place, including the short-form addiction farms.
The fact you think that not a single one out of hundreds of millions of people has a genuine belief and that they all are just dumb kids being dumb because they're kids and following trends is staggering, I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Anyway, here's this article[0] that was posted on the NYT about a week ago. It's not about AI, but many of the interviewed kids touch on its future downsides in ways that aren't just "AI bad cuz TikTok". And these kids are young, their worldviews aren't half as coherent as a 16 year old's. They were definitely pre-selected by the editors and probably aren't representative of the average kid, but they represent some of them. That's enough for your request of n=1.
> I don't think any adult generation has ever had an opinion this extreme about their youth.
Literally every adult generation has done this for time immemorial, just like the "kids these days" or "the next generation is screwed because X". I'm not saying no kid can have genuine belief nor was I saying that no kid has a coherent anti-AI argument _but_ this article is talking about slang, just because "that's ai" is slang and has negative connotation does not, for one second, mean that kids using that are actually anti-AI. It's slang, not a policy position.
People are reading way too much into that. In 1 year the slang will have moved on and will not be the basis for how they think about AI. Go look at the history of slang, it's not policy forming in the way it's being presented by some in this thread, that's the issue I have.
Just like when kids my age said "that's gay", that didn't mean they were all homophobic, it was slang. Some of those people grew up to be actual homophobes, some grew up to be gay, some grew up to allies. The same will happen here and none if it will be due to the year/months that it existed as slang.