Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why Students Can't Stop Using ChatGPT

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Students are using ChatGPT for everything. Parents are freaking out and the media is calling it the end of education as we know it. But are students really outsourcing their minds to machines? Are we witnessing the collapse of critical thinking, or are we just afraid of what change actually looks like?In this episode, I’m joined by journalist Kat Tenbarge to break down the rise of ChatGPT in schools. We talk about whether school still serves the purpose it claims to and what does academic integrity mean in a world where AI can be used for everything?***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenzhttps://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social

In classes where I was just focused on, like, that final outcome, that final grade, I couldn't even tell you a single thing that I learned. What I learned was how to cheat the system. Recently, New York Magazine published a big story titled, Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College. ChatchipT has unraveled the entire academic project. The piece went extremely viral, and it tapped into a growing panic that generative AI, especially ChatchipT, is dismantling the foundation of education itself.

On TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, and in parent and teachers groups all over, reactions ranged from concern to outright alarm. People are wondering if this is the end of learning as we know it. Are students permanently outsourcing their minds to machines? Is our entire educational system about to collapse? Kat Tenbarge, a former reporter at NBC News, who recently went independent and has covered AI extensively, is joining me to break all of this down. We're going to talk about the rise of chaty PT in schools, what's actually going on and whether reality matches the hysteria. Kat, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Okay, I'm so excited to talk to you about this topic because I feel like we've been talking about it for so long on the phone. No, we had to make it into a podcast. So you and I have both covered AI a lot, I feel like, but I think what's recently happened is there's been a lot of stories in the media. Obviously, the New York Magazine one went super viral, but it's not the only one. There's also like TikToks, Instagrams, and people are basically starting to just freak out about the level of chat GPT use in schools. Yes, it's really obvious from a lot.

lot of these trends that have cropped up on social media and also a lot of this reporting, that the use of AI in schools is really pervasive. And early statistics and studies show that it could be upwards of 90% of students have talked about using AI and chaty BT in some capacity. And you see lots of anecdotal evidence and lots of social media trends that suggest people are basically having it write essays for them. And they're having it right projects for them and outlining things, But also you see people talking about how they're basically just submitting entire school papers that are written by chat GPT. And there's been a big panic kind of emerging from this. I saw a story the other day about how some students are intentionally inserting typos and errors into their chat GPT written work to try to make it seem more authentic.

In this New York Magazine piece, it talks about kids that are increasingly relying on it for everything. They've sort of outsourced their brain to it. And they're using it not just to write their class. projects and essays, but also communicate with teachers. I've even seen examples also of teachers using it to help evaluate students' papers and work and things like that. So it's definitely happening on both sides of the education system, but I feel like the freak out, as you mentioned, is happening with kids using it and young people just being so completely reliant on it. Yes, it's basically this idea that kids aren't going to learn how to think for themselves or learn how to

write or be literate because they're relying on chaty-B-T for everything, which is an interesting idea, but I feel like the reporting we have so far does not quite bear that out yet. It sort of just puts forward this idea of like brain rot, and I feel like it furthers a lot of the way that technology's been written about where it's like the internet is rotting your brain, kind of the way that we've always spoken about technology as well. It used to be like TV is rotting your brain. The music that you're listening to is rotting your brain. But here it seems to be like, okay, it has completely replaced these critical thinking skills that these kids have and they can't make any decision without it. And I do think that kids themselves,

even have fed into this narrative. You see a lot of TikToks that are like that friend who can't make a single decision or can't say a single thing without asking ChatGPT to generate a response. Yes. And I feel like some of the content that I've seen about ChatGPT is more so in jest, but people who are older who aren't familiar with Internet humor might not even pick up on that because I've seen like a lot of viral reels and viral TikToks that are like Chat ChacheePT is now my best friend. And I feel like a lot of people looking at that would be like, oh my God, like these kids don't have any friends. That ChatTDP is the only person they talk to. And it's like there's a certain level of sarcasm and internet humor that isn't always translated over. And then also I just

think young people tend to over exaggerate. I do the same thing. It's something that everyone does, but particularly I think young people are very comfortable saying things like, oh, I'm addicted to chat GPT or I'm addicted to TikTok. People are talking about how much they rely on chat GPT and young people are making content about this, but it's tongue and cheek and adults and older people reading it may not always understand that. I think one reason there is such a chat GPT freak out and concern is how quickly the technology was adopted. Chat GPT was only released a couple years ago and it has already become a mainstay. I feel like it's one of those technologies that truly feels revolutionary the first time you use it. Then once you use it enough, you realize, oh, it's, it's a actually doesn't work that well and still can't even write like a coherent news article headline. But when you first start to use chaty TV and other generative AI tools, I feel like it feels like this paradigm shift. Absolutely. It helps that the way that open AI sells and markets this technology kind of implies that it can do more than it actually can. And within the AI industry of people like Sam Altman making these really lofty promises about what the technology will be able to do for us in the

future. And I think people look at it as if it's able to do that now. So let's talk about how it's actually being used and like what our reporting has found. I think both of us have also talked to a lot of people. I recently have been working on a video about people like worshiping chat GPT. So I do think that there's like some people that are mostly adults. Honestly, most of the people that I've spoken to are like boomers. But it's clear that this technology is pervading multiple areas of society. Have you talked to any students who have used chaty PD or who rely on it? regularly for schoolwork. I have talked to people who use chat GPT in school,

and I've mainly talked to people who use chat GPT for work. But in both sort of categories, the way that people describe using it is it takes up like one function of the process that they're doing. So like, for example, I've talked to people who use chat GPT to make outlines for essays that they're working on.

And then the way they've described it to me is like, I'll have chaty PT come up with what the different paragraphs are about. and then I go back and actually fill that out. But they're using it as a way to cut down on the time that they have to put into the assignment or the project that they're working on. And then I've also talked to a lot of people who basically use chat GPT as like their primary search engine, partially because Google results have become so much less helpful. Google as a tool has become less and less useful over time.

So I know a lot of people who are now using chatypt as their primary search engine. And then in addition to that, they'll be like, okay, help me organize my thoughts or help me figure out what I'm writing about, the order that I'm writing things in. Everyone I've spoken to uses it like all the kids that I've talked to. Definitely use it as a search engine, as you mentioned, because Google has just become completely unusable and unreliable itself. I definitely have talked to students that use it to write their papers. I think that what they would say is like a lot of that is busy work and they're sort of just automating processes that they don't want to use it. But there is also this like self-awareness to the use that I feel like isn't really. captured in these articles. And it's actually something you see more come out on like TikTok and

Instagram where in these videos, people talk, especially young people, talk about their reliance on chat GPD, but they joke about how it's not reliable. And they joke about how they have to rewrite half of it. And they joke about actually how it's not as good as they wish it was. I agree. I think that like with all new technological advancements over the past many years, there is an attempt of people to integrate it into their lives, to streamline tasks to do things for them, but it's never as black and white as sort of the moral panic around the technology makes it seem. And I definitely think, as you were saying, with the busy work aspect and the timing aspect, this is something that precedes AI. This has been sort of what the school culture is

like from definitely the time that I was in high school and college. And I think even before that. Well, one big thing that I think is exacerbating this issue is the rise of homework and out-of-school homework from when you and I were growing up, like millennial era, I guess, or I guess you're more millennial, but certainly like my millennial era. I mean, we had hours and hours of homework that I never did. But the kids today are saddled with even more schoolwork outside of work and even more extracurricular activities. And they just simply have less and less free time than kids even two decades ago. And so I think a lot of these kids are already feeling completely overburdened just by the amount of work that they have to do outside of school. I mean, I personally think we shouldn't even assign

kids homework. It teaches them to have terrible boundaries. It teaches you to like literally bring your work home. Like, why are we doing that? They have a lot of work that they physically don't have time to do. I mean, some of these kids, especially if you're academically competitive, you're working until 1 a.m. 2 a.m. and you're completely sleep deprived just to get some essays done. I mean, absolutely if there's this new AI tool that can come along and sort of like ease some of that burden, you would use it. Yes. And I feel like one thing that's really left out of this conversation a lot is that there are so many different pressures that high school age students have. Some students have to work to help survive and sustain their family. I went to high school with kids who would leave school and then go to McDonald's and have a shift

until late that night, which leaves you no time to do homework if you are going to have any sort of healthy sleep schedule. It is so hard, I feel like, for high schoolers to get eight hours of sleep because school starts so early in the morning. And whether it's extracurriculars or a part-time job or a club. Oftentimes, you don't start doing homework until 7 or 8 p.m. at night. So how are you supposed to get up at 5 in the morning and get all of this work done? Well, that goes into this idea of academic integrity, which is what I think so many of these stories focus on, right? It's like this idea of the children are learning the way that they're supposed to be learning. And I totally get that. And I do think that, yes, most children are not

learning the way that they should be learning. But I don't know that it's fair to blame it all on chat, I think it's exacerbating much bigger systemic problems in our education system, which is the fact that our entire education system is not really designed for learning at all, like right now, at least the public education system. It's very focused on like teaching to tests. They teach in a lot of outdated ways. I'm very anti, like, I guess the current school system. There's a great podcast called Sold a Story and it talks about basically how we've been teaching kids to read all wrong for years because of like lobbying efforts and other things. And so a lot of this freak out about AI. it rings a little hollow because I'm like, well, you're kind of begrudging these kids for not valuing learning, but how much does our current educational system actually value learning? A hundred percent. And this is something that we've talked about a lot, which is that every time there's any new social media platform that is blowing up or anytime there's new technology that is suddenly being adopted and becoming really popular, people want to make that the root cause for all of the problems that existed before that technology. Like we've talked about this a lot

with moral panics around social media, where it's much easier to blame these deeper, more nuanced systemic issues on whatever the brand new thing is versus actually looking at the situation for what it is, which is a lot harder of a question to solve. But when it comes to education and schools and how students are being incentivized, for years, students have been looking for ways to cheat the system because the system is cheating them. It is not like the educational system was perfect and it's students fault and that students are lazy or they're not intellectually capable. A big part of the issue is in what the school system has taught students to do to succeed. There was this funny tweet that came out after the New York Magazine article that was like back in millennials days. Like we had to wait

for somebody to upload all the answers to our quizzes on Quizlet or something. Yes. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is how much I had to like, quote unquote cheat to get by in school. And there were a lot of different reasons for that. And, And it's not like it was just me, it would be like the entire class would collaborate in order to pass a singular test. Or like there were ways to sneak information into tests that everybody was doing. I remember when they introduced calculators in classes that were more advanced like calculus, you could literally write information, you could store it in your calculator.

So people would write down formulas and then those would get passed around like during tests. Or when I was in college, I remember I had this really awful interesting. introductory philosophy class, and we had this student teacher who didn't really know what she was doing. And so none of us were actually learning the material. So during tests, people would literally pass around some of the answers to the tests so that we could pass this course, because none of us were actually learning anything. And I don't think that was any one person's fault. I think it points to like much broader systemic institutional failures in the educational system. I mean, I am extremely dyslexic and have severe ADHD. So I was never a good student. And I went to public school

my whole life growing up. A great public school system, by the way, like theoretically, I mean, I went to school in Fairfoot County, Connecticut, one of the best public school systems in America. But the way that they teach is so outdated, right? Like the way, especially in the 90s and 2000s when I was in school, it was very like teaching to the test, but also it's like a very outdated mode of teaching. What they really want to teach you is to like sit down and be quiet and learn to sit still for seven hours or whatever a day and listen to authority and don't be creative and don't think outside the box. It made me feel like school was just sort of like child prison and it's just sort of teaching you to work on like an assembly line and like listen and do what you're told.

And it doesn't teach you real critical thinking skills. And I don't think it makes learning exciting. And I don't think that's the fault of all the amazing teachers out there. I mean, I have a few friends that are educators now. And according to them and I don't know too much about like each school system, but it seems like they're restricted from what they can do. Right. Like everybody has to teach a certain way because.

of certain curriculum, because of these school boards and because of funding, it's like you have to get certain test scores. You have to make kids show up even when they're sick, which is a big thing now, too. We're just like forcing kids into unventilated classrooms, giving them brain damage with repeated infection of disease, and then being like, why don't you love learning? You know, it's like, well, this sucks. I mean, it's funny because people want to blame students for gaming the system, but the system itself is literally a game. I think about my high school experience and how it was basically all framed as preparing you for college. So the entire outset of high school for me, it was not about learning as much as possible. It was literally about how to get the highest scores

in AP classes because those could become college credits so that you would be able to spend less time in college and spend less money on getting your college degree. And it's like if that is the way the system is set up, then students are being told what it is is a game and it's about getting these numbers as perfect as possible so that you can spend less money in pursuit of ultimately getting a better job. First of all, I can't believe your school encourage you to spend less money in college. I feel like that is such a difference maybe between where we grew up, at least at my big public high school that I went to. There was no like spend less money on college. It was all you have to get into the best possible school. You have to do everything and get the best grades, as you said, and sort of be performative in all these ways to get into the best school and take on as much debt as possible to go to

the best school. Take on debt, game the system because you have to get into the school. And why do you have to get to the school? Not to learn. You don't want to go to Yale because you're going to learn information that's better than the local community college. You want to go there because you just need that stamp on your resume so that you can get the best, the highest paying job. A hundred percent. And I feel like for me, my mentality around school was also informed by like my parents because my parents were very cognizant of how much of a crisis student debt was. So they, really tried to funnel me into thinking about it in through that lens, but a lot of people in my peer group were absolutely looking at like, how can I get into the best Ivy League? And the debt to

them was part of the package of this fantasy that was being sold, which was like, as long as you do high school and then college right, your life will in school easily. And you don't have to worry about that debt until later. And when I actually did get to college, when I had like worked so hard to not have student debt because that was the lesson that had been instilled in me. But in so many of my peers, there was that moment when the other shoe dropped, which was after we graduated, those jobs that could pay for our student debt did not immediately materialize. And instead, a lot of people- ever materialized. Yes. I was very aware of student debt, but a lot of my peers weren't. And it was all about getting to the best school possible to get the best job possible. I mean, I'm so grateful.

both my parents met at state school, my siblings and I all went to state schools. I think one thing that you realize if you go to a big state school is just that there are actual like genius is going to that school. And then there are people that probably like myself and other idiots that like, you know, barely made it in. I think the millennials were sold this like fake dream that didn't exist. And, you know, when we grew up, I guess it was like Clinton, Bush and stuff, people still believed in the system. And it was like, go to college, as you said, get the best education. And there'll be a job. for you that you can work at for 40 years. And I do think the financial crisis was like a pivotal moment where we started to see that that didn't exist anymore. Those jobs didn't exist. Like you can

actually work for 40 or 50 years at a company and then just lose everything overnight. Yes. And I feel like I was in high school and college after 2008. And I think that this is an even more intensified environment for people in those environments now. Because now that that promise and that idealism has been lost. There's even less of an idea that school is about learning or that education is about bettering yourself. After 2008, if you were growing up, like I went to high school in the 2010s and then college after that, and so much of that pre-2008 idealism had already been lost. So it just exacerbated this feeling that the system was rigged against you. Well, also in the early 2010s, I think we also started to see the rise of the tech boom and this like Silicon Valley optimism

that was so pervasive under Obama, where dropping out was kind of seen as like a status symbol, right? It was like, he went to Harvard, but he dropped out. Or you started to hear about the Teal Fellows, right? It was like basically tech making school irrelevant and, you know, to be the best founder, you actually need to found your company at 17 and just skip college. I mean, ultimately a lot of that, I don't know if it's born out or not, but I do think that like the rise of tech and this sort of anti-education, almost, which is ironic because it's coming from these Silicon Valley billionaires that all went to Ivy League schools themselves, of course. They're telling kids, like, drop out, go to a coding boot camp, you know? You don't need to go to NYU. Just go to, like, Code Academy. And so I think you just started to see, especially throughout the 2010s, a lot of, like, changing notions of education and sort of like the cracks been getting to show and people thinking, okay, maybe this like bargain isn't worth it. A hundred percent. And it was also a period in which so many of the people in high school were watching creators.

And it was the period where like Carly Kloss was selling this version of feminism that was like learn how to code at a young age. And it was also like one of my vivid early YouTube memories was seeing Jenna Marbles be like, oh, I cry over my master's degree, which I don't use and I became a YouTuber instead. And YouTubers were just beginning to be a concept. But it was like even then, I knew from such a young age that the people who I admired and seeing how they had become successful was not because of their college education. It was because of their usability of social media. I think this was all sort of like building throughout the 2010s and then COVID hit and everything went online. And I feel like that's when we really started to see honestly the cheating. I talk to young people a lot for work.

And so many of them were like, I'm done. Like we're living through a global pandemic. I'm like living at home. I can barely get on the internet. Both my parents are working remotely and out of the living room. And I'm expected to like perform well on my test. Of course I'm going to start cutting corners. You know, like this is just really hard.

These are really hard times. And instead of giving students grace during that period, I feel like they were expected to just keep continuing to learn at the same pace. And basically also told to ignore this like mass tragedy around them. I mean, millions of kids have lost a primary caregiver, by the way, since COVID began. I think it was like in 2022, they found, I can't even remember what it was like 200 million kids or something crazy, had lost a primary caregiver. And that was just in 2022 before the worst of the pandemic. So I feel like students also started to see, oh, you don't actually care about us. Like, you don't actually care about our education.

And I can actually learn on my own and do Zoom school. It just sort of, like, broke this idea of, I feel like, traditional schooling. I agree. And people talk about how there was, like, a breakdown of the social contract during this period. And I think that it is so insane to me that the response to that is, like, these kids just need to work harder. Like, these kids get back into the classroom and they're so lazy and they can't even read. And it's like, I understand why people. jump to that. Like, I understand why people may have that idea pop into their head. But as adults,

we have to do self-reflection and embrace and, like, actually understand what these kids are going through. There's such a lack of empathy for young people who have grown up in this time and who are still growing up in this time and what they've been through. And the idea that, like, it's all of their fault. It's so reactionary. It's wild. And also, I mean, I still can't get over how they forced kids back into school early, knowing that it was unsafe, knowing that COVID harms children just as much as it harms adults. Like there's this lie that like, oh yeah, this virus just doesn't affect kids. It's like, what are you talking about?

You're just like forcing your kids back into school, giving them unmitigated brain damage from COVID, asking why they're not performing well. And so much of it was because parents didn't want their kids around. And I get it. Parents are overwhelmed too. But I think so many people are just fundamentally. I don't want to say they're unprepared to be parents because like they're also under pressures of capitalism.

And I know so many parents were like open the schools and like joining. Again, this is what made so many parents embrace far right rhetoric. COVID denialism where even to this day, they are in denial about the fact that they're sending kids into unsafe schools. But it's like they have to work too. I think it like trickles down because we're telling kids, shut up about this global crisis. And by the way, the amount of like turmoil in the world, the wars, everything you're exposed to. Like shut up about that.

You need to work harder than ever. And I think that's because we're telling their parents, you also need to work harder than ever. Like there's no room for anybody to like take some time off and focus on their mental health. It's like just work harder, grind harder. A hundred percent. So much of what we talk about with kids and what they're experiencing. with technology and on a societal level is reflected within the adult population,

which includes their parents. And it's like adults are also increasingly relying on technology to be able to complete their workload, to be able to do all the things they need to do throughout the day. And that's what's being modeled to the generation of kids at home and at school. Like they're seeing their parents also have to use social media more,

be online, more, be on their phones more. They're seeing their teachers do the same thing. So it's not a product of the youth. It's a product of like the, the entire totality of what we are going through as a culture. It reminds me also of like the media freak out about people that were, I can't remember the word that they made up for it, but basically people that were working like two jobs at once because they were working

remotely. They didn't have to be in an office. They could take on a second job. And by the way, they were completing the duties of their first job and basically able to hold down two jobs simultaneously successfully. And this was like villainized in the media as like stealing time from your employer or whatever.

And it's just like, God, like if someone can get their work done in three hours, is why are you so focused on making them sit and return to office and sit in a chair for eight hours so you can control them? It just shows that like the jig is up and it's not actually about getting your work done. And I think that's also so much about the return to in-person schooling and like trying to put kids into this like 1980s model of school, even though we've seen that it's all a lie. If you know you can do Zoom school and get your work done in three hours and then you're forced to go back to school and sit in a chair for seven hours and just for no reason. It's like, oh, you don't actually care about me learning the material. you care about maintaining control, like physical control over me.

And I feel like the mentality around return to office and this idea that it's like so villainous to be doing two things at once, to have two jobs at once, it completely ignores the root problem, which is that people wouldn't need to have two jobs at once if one job was enough to live off of. And that is the reality in the world that these kids are growing up with. They already know that like they are not going to be financially supported in adulthood. They're not going to be able to financially support them. themselves. So of course, they're like embracing this mentality at an early age of like, quote, unquote, cheating, which is really just being able to do the tasks that you need to do on a baseline in society. It's not just like COVID, I think, that exacerbated this. I think it's also our economic system and the rise of crypto and how our entire economy is around like a lottery. And I mean, also so much of the rise of digital influencers and all of this stuff. I was at this event the other night. And my friend Bobby from NPR, who's a tech reporter, ended up talking to this like 19 year old scammer that basically just still. crypto for a living. And he was telling him, like, why not? Bankers steal money or, you know, they do

crimes. They don't even go to jail. I think there's this sense that everybody at the top is cheating and probably cheated to get there. So why not get mine? Which we know to be true. Like, we know that white-collar crime is not prosecuted. And we know that white-collar criminals are not held accountable. We know that the president of the United States is a criminal. Like, we know we see, and these are our societal ideals that are being passed down to children. And in principle, on them from a very young age of how to behave and how to behave in a way that will be successful for you. All of it just makes me so frustrated or the discourse makes me so frustrated too because it's like there are real problems with AI and like I don't want to dismiss that. I don't want to

be like, listen, like kids scam your way through. Why not? Like that is a problem. We actually don't want to live in that society. Like we do want to live in a society the values learning. But I feel like we can't do that when we're in this like tech denialist phase either where it's like ban cell phones in schools, ban the internet until you're 18, ban chat GPT. It's like these are technologies, as you mentioned, that are actually getting more and more pervasive in the workforce. And young people need to be exposed to them and learn them. And it reminds me so much of the debate around cell phones and the internet and social media too, where it's like, they want to ban all this stuff from schools, right? And the richest kids, it doesn't matter if it's

banned in their schools because they have enormous access outside of it. This idea, by the way, that all these Silicon Valley kids, well, they don't even let their own kids use the technology. That is such a lie. These kids have MacBooks from the time. They're like three. They're learning coding. They're learning to use technology. They are learning it outside of school primarily. So they're, you know, they might be sent to some like school where they're playing with wooden blocks all day and learning whatever. But I promise you, these tech executives are pro technology and teaching their kids tech. And those kids have access to iPhones and other, you know, they're learning about stuff. The poorest kids don't have those opportunities. And when you ban this stuff from school and you say, like,

we're not teaching you to use AI, they sort of have to learn it themselves on their own, not in any sort of guided way. And that harms them ultimately in the like employment market and just like their ability to sort of compete in this new tech enabled economy. I feel like there's almost a parallel here. And I know that these issues are different, but it reminds me of abstinence only education. If you only teach abstinence, then rates of teen pregnancy skyrocket and unsafe behaviors skyrocket and diseases are transmitted. So it's like abstinence only education. We know this does not work. We know that this is rooted in a moral panic and in a misunderstanding of human behavior and stigmatizing things that should not be stigmatized. We know that the best way to

educate kids about things that could be potentially dangerous to them is to give them as much information as possible so that they are armed with knowledge so that it's not just fearmongering. And yet in lots of schools and in lots of communities, the science around these topics is not embraced. Like places continue to do absence-only education and they continue to fearmonger about all of these behaviors that could result in harm. And you see the exact same thing happening with technology. And this idea that if you just ban the use of the internet and the use of cell phones from kids,

then they won't endure these types of dangers, nothing bad will happen to them, when the opposite could not be more true. Like, kids will be significantly more endangered if they are not allowed to use technology or learn about technology until the time that they're an adult. You just have a bunch of 18-year-old adults who are immediately going to go on Instagram and get scammed, if not worse.

Yes. Every single time somebody suggests this type of stupid stuff, mostly Jonathan Hyde and these other morons that like, I guess, support this sort of position, which, by the way, they're only doing it for their own reactionary self-interest. But I ask, okay, what happens when they turn 18? Because you want to keep kids from chaty PT, say, until they turn 18. You want to ban this stuff in schools. I get that. But what happens when they turn 18? They get to college and then they have unmitigated access to this new tool that they are just going to abuse. And whether they get scammed online, sure, they're getting scammed online. I mean, we know that like these age verification schemes. make kids more likely to be victims of identity theft and all these sorts of things. But it's just like, I don't know. So much of the chaty PT stuff is like, you know, people are probably using a lot of this in college too. And so I feel like it's so important to expose kids actually at a very, very young age to these technologies, whether it's social media, cell phones or chat GPT.

It's like we actually need to teach them from maybe even before they have a cell phone, all this stuff. And maybe even before they can barely learn to type, like teach them about AI, teach them about how this stuff works and basically teach them how to ethically use it and not ethically use it and how to use it to get an accurate information and help you and how not to use it. And also to challenge the tools themselves. Like look at them and be like, okay, here's some answers. Like, do these seem biased? Why are they biased? Who makes these technologies? How do these AI algorithms actually filter information in our world? And what can we do to sort of like critically think about

that? I feel like people think that this is counterintuitive to introduce things to kids young. but evidence shows that this is the best way to educate kids and teenagers before they reach adulthood to actually protect them from the unintended consequences of all of these types of technologies and behaviors. And I think that there's also, I mean, I don't want to sound like a pro tech, like weirdo, but I do think as somebody with such severe ADHD and learning disabilities, that we should welcome alternative forms of learning. And I think there's a lot of value in different AI tools.

in terms of like text to speech or helping disabled people with language translation or visual aids or like even just technology that can adapt to different learning styles and paces. Like that's valuable. But it's about having the teachers and educators that can help children learn how to use that successfully or leverage these tools in a way to help them. And I think the big problem is that the teachers themselves

don't know how to use this technology. And it just goes back to like the moral panic of it all where it's like a lot of these teachers, either they're relying on chat, GPD themselves. and most educators, I think, just fundamentally aren't that plugged in. And they don't need to learn about this technology. We don't have any sort of like widespread training for teachers across America where every year they have to learn about the latest in the internet or technology or like digital

literacy. A lot of teachers, public school teachers, are essentially digitally illiterate. Like they have no media literacy. Yes, 100%. And it reminds me of this gap in digital media literacy that emerged with the rise of smartphones. Because even when I was a young kid. kid. I had computer classes in elementary school that taught me how to use Microsoft. Like, I was taught how to use PowerPoint. I was taught how to type. So there's no national standard for

digital literacy. There are no sort of national widespread efforts to educate kids or teachers about the technology that they're using. And so we've actually were in a worse place than we were when we had more standardized computer classes. The assumption that is prevailing, in a lot of educational environments today is that technology is so intuitive that kids actually understand it better than adults. But in reality, like, we've already seen how much of a structural failure this is because the digital media literacy has fallen across the board. I mean, I think that like young people are just as likely to get scammed and fall for misinformation as a lot of people in older generations. It's just the platform is different, right? Like,

you're getting misinformed through TikTok rather than Facebook AI slop. but I don't think that there's any sort of like cohesive knowledge. And I think it just goes back to this abstinence attitude towards tech where it's about like shutting it down and not having a critical relationship. My friend Brian yesterday was telling me how like schools in LA County, I guess like paid millions of dollars for some like AI system upgrade or whatever. And it's like, what's frustrating is like you do see these school districts try to be tech forward. But they're kind of not like they're banning cell phones and then they're paying some weird company to like do AI educational software. And it's like, guys, can we just operate in the world? world of today. I think we should teach so many things. I think we should teach personal finance to children.

I think we should also have something where it's like, hey, here's how these tech systems work. Or like a tech criticism class for kids in high school where it's like they learn about things and they question things. I just worry about the current educators teaching that before we educate the educators because I worry that that sort of classroom would just be like them repeating made up TikTok challenges and yelling about them about like the evils of the internet. You see this sort of phenomenon that we're describing with schools in like corporate workplaces as well. Because having worked for corporations, I've seen how companies will literally spend millions of dollars on technology and software that's supposed to modernize the workplace or make

employees more productive or safeguard our privacy. And in reality, there's not like tech literacy throughout the organization for that software to be effective. And in a lot of cases, we're sold technology that actually makes us less. productive. And I feel like you see the exact same thing happening in schools where it's like broadly at all levels of society, we are in desperate need of more media literacy and particularly digital media literacy. And that's why I've often said that I wish AI had never been born, so to speak, because I wish some of these technologies, like I feel like they almost came out too quickly. Like our society still has so far to go. But there's no like putting the genie back in the bottle. Like we

cannot undo or ban chaty PT and expect that to make anything better. Like, we now just have got to adapt to it. And I think a lot of people need to like catch up their understanding of the issue. And I think we need to again, reemphasize the value of learning and make classes interesting and stop busy work. There was some discourse around when that New York magazine piece dropped online of like, this is why we need to eliminate grades. And I saw people talking about going to school without grades. And I think it's kind of interesting because it's like, yeah, I mean, so much. much of homework is just forcing you to like do stuff to get a certain grade and then people cheat because they don't actually have time to do stuff or want to do it or whatever. It's like, what if we did eliminate

grades? I mean, it would be really hard. And I know you still have to like sort of measure people to make sure that you're getting some sort of knowledge. Like they should pass certain benchmarks. But I don't know. I just, I feel like this is time where we can really start to radically reimagine education. And instead of doing that, we have this crackdown and freak out about chat GPT or AI use. I definitely agree. I think that looking back at my own educational experience, when I was so focused on grades, that was not when I was doing the most learning. It was the opposite. When I was hyperfixated on grades, because I was told I had to be, when I was told, like, you need to care about your GPA above everything else and you need to care about the grades that you're getting. That's actually what incentivized me to cheat because I was like, my learning doesn't matter. All that matters is the output. And that's what this current generation of students has. been raised on. I think about how in college there was this one class that I took, and it was a class that I mainly took for fun. It was well outside my major. And the way that the professor evaluated us was through, like, class presentations, essentially. Like, you had to get up in front

of class once a week and present your understanding on a topic. And there was still a grade at the end of the semester, but it wasn't a grades focused class. It was an understanding focused class. And that I always look back on as like the best educational experience I ever had where I actually did learn things. In classes where I was just focused on like that final outcome, that final grade, I couldn't even tell you a single thing that I learned. What I learned was how to cheat the system. Yeah. And I also think like some of this stuff is overblown. Like I wonder how much these kids are really cheating or how brainbroken they really are. Because I feel like some of these articles, they paint a very dire picture.

And I do think that the picture is dire in certain instances. I do think it's not great that like how many. many people are relying on these tools in the workplace and in school at the expense of learning. I don't know. It seems like some of it is also a little bit hyperbolic. Like I think didn't even one of the girls in the New York MAG article say that she actually stopped using chaty PT. Yes. This actually blew my mind because when I read the New York magazine Chat TPT cheating article, it did scare me. Like I finished reading that article and I was like, this is really frightening like what's being described here. But it interested me so much that I ended up

doing a little digging afterward and found out that the reality does not necessarily match what's portrayed in that article. So they interviewed this freshman in college. She's a female student in Canada. And in the article, they mentioned her Reddit username. And I went and looked to see if she was commenting and talking about the article and she was. And what she said on Reddit was that actually the article portrays her as being hopelessly addicted to chat GPT and not being able to write an essay on her own.

it basically insinuates that she does all of her work on ChachyPT and oh my gosh, she's not learning anything. Isn't that terrifying? On Reddit, she revealed that she actually stopped using ChachyPT by the time she was interviewing for this article and completed the entire last semester of school without using ChachyPT at all, which is such a different picture than what this article portrays. And I'm like, oh, so the argument that the article rested on was not even borne out in reality. and I think that the idea that students can make their own decisions and decide to stop using these programs, that is much more reflective of reality and it's a much less terrifying picture.

And I felt really happy for this young woman, but also sad that now she has this article that's not actually reflecting the reality of her life. Yeah. And also, as you said, I think we need to remind kids that they are empowered to stop using it or to use it in a better or more effective way, right? Like, don't use it to write your whole essay unless you're like finishing a double shift at McDonald's. and you have to or whatever. But yeah, like moderate your use and make sure that you're still learning and learn to set your own boundaries. Yeah, the last thing I think of is one of my best friends who is one of the smartest people I know in college, there was one time where she had me write a paper for her. And the fact that I wrote a paper for her in a class because she had so much going on in her life at the time did not make her dishonest. It did not make her a bad person.

And it certainly did not interrupt her education. Like she has an amazing job today. She's one of the smartest people I know. And I just think that this attitude of like penalizing and singling out kids because they are using the tools at their disposal to get by is not the right attitude to take about this at all. Like we need to have a more holistic attitude that actually reflects the reality of what's happening and takes into account the evidence we have about how to make school better. Yeah. And I think to do that, we need to stop the like moral panic freak out stuff about tech and like have like more of these nuanced conversations. I completely agree. Well, Kat, thank you so much for joining.

Where can people continue to follow your work? You can read my work at SpitfireNews.com, which is my independent newsletter. And you can also follow me on Blue Sky, Instagram, and TikTok. Awesome. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for joining me. All right. That's it for the show.

You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. If you like this show, don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag. That's Usermag. dot co usermag.co for all the latest tech and online culture news in your inbox two to three times a week. And if you enjoyed this episode, please give power user a rating and review on Apple, podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. My national bestselling book, Extremely Online, is also finally now out in paperback. Look at this awesome new cover. I'm obsessed with it. So you can pick it up wherever books are sold, extremely online, the untold story of fame, influence, and power on the

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