'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us

I'm always dubious of news reporting on supposed trends for young people. The press regularly makes them up. There's no evidence provided in this article that this is some sort of popular phrase.

An earlier Yahoo article on this mentions adult use of the phrase on Tiktok, if perhaps with different intent: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/article/the-cryptic-meaning-...

In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."

Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.

I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.

My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:

Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.

Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.

He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.

I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.

If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.

Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it will not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many points of view.

What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.

Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.

But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.

"Is "That's AI" the new "six-seven"? No, this bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to "bullshit"."

Perhaps criticial thinking is not in decline

i love the "Do say" and "Don't say" sections; how else am i supposed to speak like gen alpha

Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"

"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"

Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"

I can't wait until a model slurps this up and answer "What is AI?" with "AI is a pejorative term inferring low effort and dubious quality". Mmm-mm.

My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.

I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.

Can confirm my 11 year old says 'thats so AI' and means it as a slight insult.

Can confirm my 8 year old uses this to roast as well.

How am i supposed to read this? it's hard to do so

AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content

Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.

It's true. My 9yo and 6yo use this as an insult all the time.

The whole article is so AI.

I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.

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