Funny, not funny. Your grandparents may not get AI, but young people must | Opinion

Stand-up comedian Ronnie Chieng has a bit where he chastises his parents for being online. He hysterically mocks them for failing to distinguish between real stories and those generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The joke lands because it’s painfully true — and increasingly common.

AI will become the measuring stick for generational perceptiveness, common sense, and critical thinking. Instead of viewing it as a harbinger of doom, I believe AI reveals the realities of our current collective state. Like any bell curve, there’s an aging population inclined to believe everything, a younger generation that buys none of it, and a wide swath in the middle still debating whether the Pope really wore that white puffy jacket.

Chieng jokes that the internet left his parents behind, advancing faster than they could comprehend. While exaggerated, he’s not far off. AI has transformed industries from manufacturing to healthcare, finance, and education—but its manipulation of social media content has turned into a bog of deceit.

Generational differences may stem from how people learned to trust information. For many, nightly news broadcasts, newspapers, and public figures once carried authority. Conflicts of interest existed but were buried, requiring dogged journalists to unearth them. That world collapsed with the rise of personal computers and smartphones. A slow stream of information became a tsunami. Anyone with internet access gained a license to contribute — whether thoughtful ideas, reckless claims, or outright bigotry. Speed overtook truth.

Pandora’s box has been open for a while, but AI has pushed the public into an even more dangerous arena. George Orwell warned of manipulation through rewritten history in 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and street building renamed, every date altered… History has stopped.”

AI now trains on hundreds of billions of words and images. Its responses are often skewed, based on patterns and interpretations of the user’s request. Mistakes are so frequent that the default assumption should be: the information is wrong. This demands sharper listening skills and a healthy suspicion of false confidence.

In my own experiments with an AI assistant, I corrected mistakes in real time—wrong dates, outdated headlines, vague answers. Each time, the bot apologized and promised to improve. The thought of students copying and pasting such flawed responses into their schoolwork is alarming. Those who outsource critical thinking to AI risk missing the entire point of education.

So what if we reframed AI as a test of our ability to separate truth from fiction? Deepfakes and synthetic voices will only make this harder, blurring privacy and personal freedoms. AI-generated content will saturate culture, straining an already fragile ecosystem of skepticism. The only defense is investigation, confirm sources, ask questions, slow down. As the saying goes: trust, but verify.

Has the internet left the older generation behind? Perhaps. Some savvy users still laugh at the AI-generated image of Elvis meeting John the Baptist—but they are not the majority. Meanwhile, real historical manipulation by political figures should already set off alarm bells. Add in the nonstop flood of fake “facts,” and we’re living in a state of informational fatigue.

My hope is simple: that all generations learn to pause, think, and deliberately weigh every story before scrolling past.

Jim Jackson lives in Franklin County.