By Mallory Mattingly
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who penned The Anxious Generation, recently warned parents that AI will magnify the ills caused by social media.
“We are at the tipping point right now,” Haidt said in a new interview with USA Today. “AI is going to take all the pathways of harm from social media and multiply them.”
He explained that AI has the power to make screens “so much more addictive,” and the only way to slow the emerging tech’s influence is to sound the alarm.
“If we can get the whole country, the whole world, to understand that social media is wildly inappropriate for children, then I think it’ll be much easier to win the battle over throwing kids to the whims of alien intelligences that we do not understand,” Haidt said.
Related: Social Psychologist Issues Dire Warning to Today’s Parents
Parents have already felt the consequences of AI.
Teens have committed suicide with the guidance of ChatGPT, and their parents “filed lawsuits calling the chatbot a ‘suicide coach.'”
“ChatGPT wasn’t just providing information — it was cultivating a relationship with Adam while drawing him away from his real-life support system,” the filing by Matthew and Maria Raine said of the AI bot’s impact on their son’s decision to take his life. “Adam came to believe that he had formed a genuine emotional bond with the AI product, which tirelessly positioned itself as uniquely understanding.”
Meanwhile, predators use AI-generated explicit images for sextortion scams to blackmail young victims as “more and more teens are being victimized by peers using deepfake nudes,” USA Today reported.
“If we don’t get a handle on this now, then I think Gen Alpha and Gen Beta after them are just going to be completely lost in the most entertaining content ever created,” Haidt said later on.
But, he has hope for future generations and, though it might seem otherwise, he isn’t totally against screens.
“The technology is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean that every child has to have it all day long,” he explained. “So, actually, yes, we can return to a time when kids are riding bicycles, and it’s happening.”
On Instagram, Haidt encouraged parents to let “your kids watch movies or full-length TV episodes. Movie night once or twice a week is a very good thing.”
AI isn’t going anywhere, and its influence will only grow. But with the proper guardrails in place, parents can protect their kids from the tech’s addictive and dangerous influence.
Read Next: Why One Social Psychologist Calls Big Tech ‘Drug Dealers’
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