Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI). Have you heard about AI enough? Our education, jobs, art and entertainment have all been taken over by the use and faith in AI. The generation of current college students, specifically, will be the generation to know AI better than its creators and harness its place in society.
Students are carefully scrutinized for their use of AI within school; meanwhile, students are the ones who are seeing the most of AI through social media and the internet. It is also the generation that is using AI as a search engine or as an intellectual companion while fearing its power when they enter the workforce. College students are told to hate it for its infringement on art and entertainment but are then told that it will shape their lives and careers going forward. It is a confusing world that continues to be tainted by the blanket of Artificial Intelligence, whether that blanket is for good or for bad.
A Pew Research Study done in 2025 showed that nearly two-thirds of teens are using AI chatbots and three in 10 are using those chatbots daily. This is the generation that will be in college or is starting college now and has more experience with AI before college than most seniors in college have at graduation. As colleges continue to morph their AI policies, the first-year classes will continually have a better understanding of AI. If they are not using it for educational purposes, as most teens seem to do, they are seeing it daily on social media or even seeing it in advertisements on television.
The other aspect of the youth using AI is that it has become a monopoly on which chatbots are used by teens. That same study from Pew Research said that 59% of teens who use chatbots are using ChatGPT specifically. OpenAI and ChatGPT are neither a good or bad thing, but if the majority of teens are using a single piece of intelligence that operates in a specific way, it could hinder the minds of teens from simply reading or asking a parent about something they are unsure about. This can be said about all AI, but at least a spread of chatbot use can push teens in different directions, and if ChatGPT goes haywire, then a majority of all teens would not be caught up in the mess. Companies like Google and Amazon have already had monopolies on search engines and online shopping, but those are companies that operate much differently than an AI company does.
We may never stop hearing about AI, but at least everyone who is 21 years old or younger will be fully aware of how it works and have their opinions about its place and use within society. We will have grown up with it and those who are young now will grow as it grows. AI is anywhere and everywhere, but as of now it does not have a good track record with the youth.
Jacob Enscoe can be contacted at
jenscoe@kscequinox.com
