Dear ones, let’s talk about AI in teenage years, sometimes our parents‘ generation can hardly keep up with the rapid developments and WHAT a blatant status „Chatti“ (nickname for ChatGPT) and all the other supposedly omniscient AI services already have in our kids‘ generation, I honestly didn’t realise until a brief key moment in the last few weeks.
It was such a nice evening, the week had been busy, dad was travelling on business, the boys just sat down on the living room couch at some point in the evening and instead of staring stupidly at the monitor, the most wonderful conversations unexpectedly developed.
How they tried to get the music teacher angry when they were young, what they were afraid of and that at least one of them would often crawl over to their big sister’s bed. I knew nothing about any of this and we laughed so much and reminisced.
KI in teenage years
At some point, it was also about homework and that one person in the class had been using ChatGPT properly for homework from the start and that the teacher naturally saw through this and then always asked extra offensively: „Well, xy, and what does ChatGPT say about all this“. Instead of making trouble, he simply made fun of the whole thing (the best teacher anyway!).
But then it went even further and the boys told me that some teachers were now thinking about doing away with homework altogether because it no longer made sense. They were all getting help from their little AI app assistant – so good that it was becoming less and less clear whether someone had written it themselves or not.
And call me naive, but I hadn’t even thought about that. Our boys then said things like: they don’t even remember how they managed their lives before AI, it would have changed everything for them too. I really didn’t realise that!
More equal opportunities through AI?
They have mock exams created for learning, the digital helper is allowed to help with every foreign word and you know my attitude to digital and I don’t just take a critical view of it and immediately thought: Can’t this also create more equal opportunities for children who don’t have parents to help them with their homework or know how to explain photosynthesis?
And don’t the kids learn to stay curious when they are really interested in something and feed the machines so that they can really find out everything about their topic of interest? And don’t we still learn something in the process? In any case, the fact that our boys are now doing a bilingual degree is not due to my blatant knowledge of English, but to the fact that their favourite TikTokers are American and so the language has become second nature to them.
And yes yes yes, I also see the dangers and I understand the discussion about whether there should be an age limit for it and yes, I too think that human characteristics and achievements should never be replaced by AI, but if we can find a way of dealing with it…
… the fact that we have a kind of assistant in our lives with these small, supercomputing apps that help us to build up knowledge or save time for things that we can then use more sensibly, then I find that fascinating too. Or how often do you tell your children? Uff, I don’t know that right now. And then you can quickly look it up together.
We didn’t have any of that in our own childhood. As a result, my general knowledge at my kids‘ age was significantly less than theirs. Definitely! They use it to help themselves, know all the capitals of the world and all the airports too (don’t ask why they care, but I couldn’t have given them any information about them). I was talking to my mum about it the other day and she said: „Gosh, we used to search around in foreign dictionaries back then when we only needed to know one word“.
I myself was afraid of AI for a long time, it feels like I only started using it two or three months ago and I’m already realising the relief it can bring me. Not because ChatGPT now writes emotional teen-time columns (you’d notice that, for sure), but because I sometimes need inspiration for a new project and then have three options spit out that simply give me an idea (which then usually becomes a completely different one, but this nudge can be so helpful).
Or if I have a text summarised or ask: Hey, can you filter out three key ideas from the big study? And then I can continue working with that. By myself. With my own head. But with a nudge from outside. If we manage to convey this to our children: Your thoughts are irreplaceable, your head machine still has to work, but you can get help from time to time to think outside the box, then that can be great.
Even when I recently spoke to a teacher about how some of his colleagues were thinking about doing away with homework altogether because it no longer made sense and I thought aloud that the only way to check how much knowledge a child really has is in exams, he denied it.
„They leave their second mobile phones in the toilets“. „Second mobile phones?“ I asked. The trend is even towards third mobile phones, he said. And no, I’m out of that too. I think it’s great to use all the possibilities to expand our knowledge, but not to refuse to work on our own thinking. I think we can agree on that… right? (Of course, we had bungled notes too, but at least we wrote them ourselves and actually got the gist and learnt in the process)
P.S. This text was written entirely without machine AI inspiration. Just like all the texts here on the blog so far. And it should stay that way, because it’s about real life and real experiences and feelings and not purely factual knowledge transfer.
