If I Don’t Use AI, Will My Grandkids Still Think I’m Cool?

As a retiree, I want to stay close to my grandkids. I worry that not learning how to use AI will leave me behind. What’s the easiest tool for me to learn, and should I be worried? —Lifelong Learner Be not afraid! I promise that you do not need to learn how to use a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude to ensure your grandkids see you as a relevant, informed person. If anything, I would say that our culture has tipped over the past year to generally oppose the use of generative AI tools due to their outsize environmental impact, ethical concerns over their data scraping, and general sludginess of the outputs. So, depending on your relatives' worldview, confessing that you don’t use any chatbot tools might even boost your cool factor with them. Also, AI chatbots are possibly eroding our social skills. OpenAI recently conducted a research study to determine whether repetitive ChatGPT usage made users feel lonelier and less social overall. It did; the most frequent ChatGPT users in ... Read full article.