Writer Anya Kamenetz reports that at least one student is not excited about AI in the classroom. That’s her 13-year-old, Lu.
ChatGPT for homework? No thanks. Research? A joke. Idle conversation? Pass. Lu refuses to look at AI slop videos for any reason. When we see AI-generated art out and about, they point it out and denounce it, and they’re teaching my 8-year-old to spot it as well.
Where does this attitude come from? I am definitely an AI skeptic, but my kid is far more hardcore, for four reasons we discussed recently.
First, Lu makes a lot of digital art and follows indie illustrators and animators online. That community largely considers AI art to be soulless, ugly plagiarism.
Second, their main friend group met playing music with a program called School of Rock. These kids are adorably retro, DIY punks with spiked dyed hair, vintage wardrobes, Converse and Doc Martens. They play physical instruments and listen to bands from 20 to 40 years ago, sometimes on actual vinyl. They seem to idealize a near-vanished concept of authenticity and anti-consumerism.
These kids dislike AI slop because it’s corporate and mass-produced, just like the physical plastic crap that surrounds us. They can see marketers shoving it down our throats, and they’re rejecting it.
Third, “it’s really bad for the environment,” Lu told me this week. “I just saw a video where a data center opened up near someone’s house, and they literally lost the drinking water out of their faucets. And there was light pollution too—they had to close their curtains.”
Finally, my kid is lucky enough to go to a competitive public school with amazing teachers, and excels at writing in particular. So they’re increasingly viewing chatbots with some of the same defensive superiority that I and other writers I know also hold — seeing AI as a crutch for mediocre minds, but also, perhaps, as potential competition.
Identity formation is a core task of adolescence, along with social development. My teen is forming an identity as a creator in these different mediums—art, writing, music—and surrounding themselves with people who honor human creativity and individuality. And AI tools, as Lu sees them, clash with those core values.