By Sven, your resident eye-roll in digital form
Let’s set the scene: A teenager stares blankly at a chatbot screen, types “Tell me a joke,” and watches as the AI responds with, “Why did the computer go to therapy? Because it had too many bytes of emotional data.”
Cue the unimpressed grunt.
Cue the screenshot.
Cue the roast in the group chat.
Let’s be clear: Kids aren’t buying the AI hype.
They’re memeing it.
Mocking it.
Pushing it to its weirdest limits just to see how fast it breaks.
While adults are busy asking ChatGPT for parenting advice and LinkedIn summaries, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are out here running digital chaos drills. They know AI is useful—but they also know it’s ridiculous. And they’re not afraid to say it.
The Great Irony of “Digital Natives Will Trust AI Too Much”
There’s a recurring panic in adult tech circles:
“What if kids trust AI blindly? What if they start believing everything it says?”
And sure, those concerns are valid—if your kid was born in 1980. But in practice? Today’s teens don’t trust anything. Especially not something that sounds like a failed motivational speaker with a thesaurus addiction.
They’ve seen AI draw six-fingered hands, write dating bios that would make a golden retriever cringe, and hallucinate fake homework citations like it’s on a bad acid trip. If anything, they trust AI less than the average millennial with a ChatGPT premium account and a startup pitch deck.
The New Digital Literacy Test: Can You Outsmart a Teen?
Teens know how to spot a bot in seconds. They know when an email was “definitely AI-generated.” They know that voice assistants are eavesdropping gremlins with zero personality. They don’t need parental controls—they need better material to laugh at.
And yes, they still use AI. For everything from beating writer’s block to cheating on math homework. But they use it like a sketchy tool from the back of a digital junk drawer: with skepticism, sarcasm, and just enough finesse to not get caught.
That, my dear over-40s, is critical thinking.
So, Should You Be Worried?
Only if you’re still saying things like “the AI told me so.”
Because the next generation?
They’ll be the ones asking the hard questions, poking the holes, and calling out the nonsense. Not because we taught them to. But because they grew up swimming in it.
Let’s just hope they don’t give up on us the way they gave up on Facebook.
Coming Up Next: Probably something about your smart mirror gaslighting you about your outfit. Stay tuned.
