Young Adults and A.I. Use ⇥ wsj.com

Natalie Kaufman, in a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Young Adults Are Letting AI Do Their Talking for Them — Even in Person”:

[Niharika] Abbaraju, 20, is part of a growing cohort of young adults outsourcing deeply human tasks to AI. Many, struggling with social anxieties great or small, will seek assistance ahead of a face-to-face encounter. Others let their bots script their text messages and even mediate their dating lives as a digital Cyrano de Bergerac.

This is a pitch-perfect trend piece, though a little too perfect, if you ask me. Kaufman is a reporting intern of similar age to the people she interviewed. It is not clear to me that this is a trait that is unique to younger people, especially when A.I. use is basically mandatory for some — often older — professionals.

I think there is an interesting secondary story here, though, which is that younger people are more likely to be regular users of this technology and they are more likely to be skeptical of it. This seems hypocritical, but perhaps it is actually causal. Recent polls from Gallup and Pew Research show they have less confidence in A.I. tools, and I think it is plausible that is because they use them more frequently. That they are using these tools to ease some social anxiety is maybe not something you or I would consider ideal, but it seems like a tacit recognition that the best use for A.I.-generated text is something as low-stakes as smoothing out an angry email. That seems more acceptable to me than fake citations in Big Four consultancy firm reports.