What A.I. Offers Our Kids, and What It Takes Away

A round-up of Sunday links that show how A.I. isn't made of magic.

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A middle schooler I know does all his research for the debate team using ChatGPT.

A 9-year-old friend uses A.I. images to build backgrounds for the movies she’s making in iMovie.

And basically everyone is using Alexa to see what the weather will be like tomorrow.

I have been trying to wrap my head around how to understand the impacts of generative A.I. (like ChatGPT and Claude), both on my own work life and on my kid’s learning.

A friend told me she is focusing on old-school research skills with her kid, including purchasing an encyclopedia, and teaching her to avoid the A.I. results that pop up in Google search, and to learn to identify quality sources. But efforts to get ahead of A.I. — “it will be an uphill battle,” my friend said — can feel overwhelming.

As the tech journalist Brandy Zadrozny described it recently, “It’s a thing that nobody asked for and nobody wanted.”

So it’s been exciting to read some really smart analysis of the impacts of A.I. and the ways it’ll be possible to work with it, and maneuver around it.

At the top of my list is the new book, Empire of A.I., by the journalist Karen Hao. It’s based on over 300 interviews with people who watched A.I., and especially the tech firm OpenAI, come to dominate the internet landscape.

She describes the tech innovators behind the fastest growing A.I. tools as forging an imperial effort: sprawling, using up labor and natural resources, all in the service of endless growth.

She describes the way that tech companies in the Global North routinely work out of the Global South, where the labor is cheaper and the digital privacy laws looser, in order to create a product that, to its users, appears to be made of magic.

She researches the environmental destruction caused by A.I., including the vast amount of water it takes to run the data centers that power the tools.

In a recent interview about the book, she describes the way A.I. companies basically disenfranchise all of us:

We are returning to an age where the majority of the world now doesn't necessarily have rights anymore.

It is these companies and the people at the top that are deciding what goes and what doesn't go, what data they can take and who gets to have privacy versus who doesn't. Who gets to have economic opportunities and who doesn't.

Everyone else lives in the thrash of their decisions and their competition.

Karen Hao is offering a big theory for understanding A.I. as a whole. Other writers have been specifically thinking through how A.I. will affect our kids’ schooling, including the use of AI tutors in classrooms.