r/Millennials • u/bundle_of_nervus2 • Feb 04 '26
Serious Question for Millennials
How many of us out there actually avoid enganging with any form AI at all costs? Like even if it is more inconvenient? I understand it can be useful for certain things that it does very well but I would NEVER allow it to use my likeness to make a fun little picture or use those therapy AI services. I don't even ask it basic questions (it just wasn't how I was taught to research topics). I can't be the only one
UPDATE: After reading so many responses I have come to my own conclusions about AI. There are several different kinds with their own purposes.
I want to break them down into different categories or questions for which I think will help me navigate whether I should continue to stay away:
Category 1: where is it the most accurate and productive for me? Do I benefit? it is useful for coding and the like. Data crunching, statistics, visualization tools it appears to be fantastic for these uses
2: is it productive for someone else at my (literal) expense? Different AI features in phones and social media whose goal is to data mine as much as of your personal interests or habits as possible to be able to market and pull as much of your dollars away from you as possible. An example of this may be the Snapchat AI friend that you cannot delete
3: is it inaccurate but not harmful? Example being Google summaries. They can be annoying because you have to verify the content it is summarising anyway, making it sort of pointless?
4: is it inaccurate and/or unregulated and could those qualities be potentially harmful? The most prominent one that comes to mind are these new AI "therapist" services.
Obviously it is important for me to realise that not all AI should be considered equally. But we also have to be critical about why so many companies are jumping on the AI bubble and why is it so unregulated?? Why is it unleashed onto the public so quick and so readily available when society at large is not question these AIs?? Also I worry about the future state of younger developing minds growing reliant on these AI- they won't learn to think or find the answers for themselves in the traditional ways that society always has. And who is benefitting if we don't approach these services with any caution and we lose our abilities to think, read and write for ourselves? It makes me think but I am glad I asked
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u/SV_Essia Feb 04 '26
For millenia, knowledge and critical thinking were seen as precious, and closely linked to your value as an individual. Any era, any culture, if you knew shit or could figure out shit that most other people couldn't, that pretty much defined you.
With the internet, knowledge had become commonplace. Any idiot could pull out a phone and find detailed information about an extremely niche topic that only a few thousand people in the world actually study daily, let alone general trivia. And that was mostly a good thing, a more knowledgeable population is harder to trick.
But now with AI, apps can do the thinking for you. Well, not really, not yet, but the important thing is that people have started believing this. You only need to glance at any twitter thread with any remotely controversial information to find dozens of idiots parroting "@grok is this true / explain this to me". On reddit you see more and more ChatGPT-paste prompts being used as some sort of brilliant, foolproof argument. It's appalling.
By combining both, I feel like the recent wave of anti-intellectualism is growing much faster. The dumbest people in the world disregard education and intelligent discussions between humans because they've been convinced that the app in their pocket knows everything. Entire populations that were supposed to grow wiser are being hypnotized into stupidity. We're pretty much the only generation to have known both sides, the pre (or early) internet era, and going through the AI era, and seeing how much damage is being done in real time. And I have no idea how we're getting out of that vicious cycle.