“Nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers report romantic relationships with AI.”
Brookings Institution, a think tank that has never met a policy recommendation it couldn’t pad into a 50-page report, warns that AI is rotting kids’ brains. Their evidence? Focus groups across 50 countries and a “literature review.” Translation: they talked to people who confirmed what they already believed and skimmed some papers.
The “doom loop” framing is pure moral panic dressed up in academic language. Kids have been “offloading thinking” to calculators, Wikipedia, and Google for decades. Brookings gets paid to produce alarming findings that justify more Brookings research. File this next to every other “technology is ruining children” study going back to Socrates complaining about writing.
That said, studying AI is a must. Its impacts, the risks, the benefits, long-term effects, economic impacts. Like anything new, we need to continually learn more. Rigor, methodology, and bias matter. And of course that means don’t trust anything coming from people with billions at stake.