New survey shows that teens are more hopeful about AI than parents

A majority of teens believes AI will help society in both the short and long term, while parents are more split on what kind of impact the technology will have. That’s among the findings of a new survey from Common Sense Media, called Generation AI.

The Show spoke about the results with Michael Robb, head of research with Common Sense Media. He started with what stood out in the results, both from the parents and the teens.

Full conversation

MICHAEL ROBB: I mean, there’s a lot of things. I think number one is that AI is already deeply embedded in the lives of American families. And the research really makes clear that families know it. They see the technology as transformative, but they also have concerns about it and they want action.

So it’s interesting to me when I say transformative, 65% of parents think that AI is going to change life as dramatically as the internet or electricity. That’s not a fringe view. That is like a supermajority of American parents saying that we are in a fundamentally new era.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the sense that these two demographics of people understand AI differently? Or maybe one understands it better than another?

ROBB: I mean, I think it is pretty compelling that there is this generational divide, because I think kids and teens are more genuinely optimistic in that more than half of them think that AI is going to help society in the long run.

And parents seem to be a little bit more ambivalent and more evenly split between thinking AI is going to help or hurt.

BRODIE: Do you think that parents understand it to the point where they really know what it is, maybe that they should be either excited about or concerned about?

ROBB: I think some parents may know. I think a lot of parents probably don’t or don’t even know how to ask. We do see a divide in, well, in how kids are using it and how parents think kids are using it. Because parents think they understand how their kids are using AI, but they’re often wrong in interesting ways.

For example, kids say by far the number one thing that they use AI for is to search for information or facts. So 59% of teens say that they’re doing that, but only 42% of parents say that’s what they think their kids are using it for. That’s a 17 percentage point gap, that’s actually fairly large.

Or things like using it for companionship. So 23% of parents think that their kids are using AI for companionship purposes. Only 8% of teens in the survey said that they were using it for that. So there’s another kind of mismatch there.

And I think that perception gap matters because it shapes how families either talk or don’t talk about AI at home. And if parents are thinking about or solving for the wrong problem, kids aren’t necessarily going to get the guidance that they need.

BRODIE: Well, and that perception gap would seem to also impact policy, which influences not just how families are dealing with AI but what the law law says about AI.

ROBB: Yes, although I will say policy is something that’s interesting because it’s something that everybody kind of agrees on. Parents and teens have a lot of concerns about how AI collects their information, how it might be used to impersonate themselves or to impersonate public figures. They have concerns about the data collection.

And overwhelmingly, kids and teens support governmental oversight of AI, including 68% of parents who want strong laws to force companies to make AI safe.

BRODIE: One of the other findings that this report had was that more than half of parents are worried that AI will make it harder for their kids to find jobs.

I wonder what the kids have to say about this. Are they concerned about that?

ROBB: They’re less concerned, but they are still concerned. It’s interesting, right? We’re in this very interesting transitional period where we’re not quite sure how AI is going to affect our jobs. I think there’s a lot of speculation that it’s going to make certain kinds of entry level jobs more scarce or more difficult to obtain.

And just in general that it’s transforming the workplace in ways that we just haven’t fully come to grips with. So parents of older children especially are much more likely to think that their children are going to have a harder time finding a job because of AI.

Kids are less concerned. They think it’s possible that it’s going to make it more difficult. Some of them think that it’s going to be actually going to make a little bit easier or it’s not, neither here nor there.

But you know what? No one here is a fortune teller. So it’s hard to say exactly which way it’s going to go.

Common Sense Media

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BRODIE: Speaking of the future, one of the other things that I thought was particularly interesting was that majorities of both parents and teenagers said that by the time that the teenagers today are adults, that people will be so dependent on AI, they won’t be able to function without it. Like, they won’t be able to function without it. That seems pretty dramatic.

ROBB: Yeah, it does. But I think it just goes to the point we were making earlier that people see this in the same way they see other transformative technologies like electricity or the internet. Just we have a sense of, like, this is really big. This is going to affect all points in our lives in ways that we might not fully comprehend. And parents and teens are picking up on that.

BRODIE: Well, so one of the things that I hear a lot — I have a teenage child — and one of the things I hear from friends is one of their big concerns is that their kids are just using AI to basically do their homework, to write their papers for them, to do all the research for them.

How much do you think that parents are and maybe should sort of look and see how schools are dealing with AI in terms of what they’re teaching and how they’re trying to implement it, and how much or how little they’re encouraging or not their students to use it to sort of influence what they then do at home?

ROBB: I mean, this is a really big gray space, right? Like, it’s funny because I have two kids. I have a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old. And I had an experience recently where I went downstairs and I saw my 13-year-old doing his homework. But then when I went over to kind of check on what he was doing, he was using ChatGPT to solve a math problem.

And I got very concerned because I thought that he was basically short circuiting the process, that he wasn’t actually learning what it was that he was supposed to do.

And he said, “No, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is I didn’t understand this. And I put this into ChatGPT and asked it to show me how to do this. And then it walks me step by step in a way that I get.”

And when I look closer at what ChatGPT was doing, it’s true. It really broke it down in very understandable language. So I was put in this uncomfortable position of trying to think, is this how AI is supposed to be used?

I’m not really sure.

What I do know is that there is no clear set of guidance school to school, district to district among states or at a national level about how AI should be used. And that leaves a lot of openings for students to put their own thoughts and opinions about how AI should be used for their schooling.

There clearly are ways that veer more toward cheating or making it so that you don’t have to do a lot of the difficult critical thinking work that you might have to do when you’re writing an essay or doing math or something like that. But there probably are spaces where using AI in a thoughtful and intentional way might actually enhance your learning.

The issue is that it’s not often clearly delineated by teachers or by schools or when that should happen.

BRODIE: So do you see AI then as kind of like things like, for example, just general Internet usage or social media where parents and kids just need to sort of agree to be open with each other and to talk about what’s going on and to bring up concerns to each other that each of them has?

ROBB: It is interesting because I think we want to try to avoid some of the pitfalls that we’ve experienced with the introduction of other technologies like social media, where we kind of gave kids unfettered use.

And then over the last couple of years more research has come out and we are now more concerned about its impacts on mental health, on body image and a host of other things. Now we’re trying to claw back some of the things that were freely given.

I think we need to be more intentional this time right from the get go about establishing what is age appropriate use of AI. And parents should probably have conversations with their kids, similar to how they might have conversations about other kinds of rules, about how AI can and cannot be used in the house or with schoolwork.