Young Adults and A.I. Use

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…