How attitudes toward AI differ across generations

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Megan McCarty-Corino (1:01)

Family Feud, AI Edition. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Corino.

At this point, we've probably all been part of a heated dinner conversation about AI.

Rana el Kaliouby has them almost nightly at home. She's an AI scientist and investor who hosts the podcast Pioneers of AI. So she spends plenty of time with folks who are enthusiastic about AI. But her own daughter is an AI skeptic, as are most people under 30 Recent survey data from the Pew Research Center found 55% of young people are more concerned than excited about the tech. El Kaliouby's teenage son, on the other hand, is an AI superuser, which makes for some pretty interesting conversations at home.

Rana el Kaliouby (2:02)

Adam, my son, is 17, and he is what we would call AI native. So he literally has a team of AI agents working on his behalf 24-7, doing all sorts of stuff like compiling study notes for him, analyzing his squash matches and giving him feedback. Jenna, my daughter, who is 23, she sits on the opposite side of the spectrum. So she graduated from Harvard last year. She's a food anthropologist and she doesn't use a lot of AI. For her, she really puts a lot of value on her own thinking and her own writing, and she doesn't really want to outsource any of that to AI.

So we have really incredible dinner conversations. My daughter was making dinner for us, and she had a good old cookbook, and she opened the recipe and was following it, and my son was sitting there. He was like, just ask Chiappi Tea, like, you know, give you the recipe. And we had a very interesting debate on, will AI ever replace recipe books? And my daughter, as you'd expect, she was like, no, because it comes from lived experience, and somebody tried the recipe upteen times. And my son's like, yeah, but AI has all of that. You could just ask it. Anyway, it was really fascinating.

Megan McCarty-Corino (3:10)

We thought it would be fun to hear from your kids because you interviewed them on the podcast.

So your daughter, Jana, she just graduated from college, as you noted, and she's very against using AI for writing specifically. Here's a clip of what she told you.

Jenna el Kaliouby (3:25)

That ability to communicate with other people and to form one's own thoughts is really hindered when you go immediately to AI to answer a question or to write an essay. It's about your ability, I think, in the long run to really think critically by yourself and put those thoughts and be able to do something really important.

Good point.

Megan McCarty-Corino (3:44)

She kind of chastises you when you use AI for writing.

Rana el Kaliouby (3:47)

Yes, she does.

And she's right in that it's not just about the writing. Like the thinking process is very messy, right? And so if you're just going to AI right away, you're not going through that process of crystallizing your ideas. So I can see her point of view.

Megan McCarty-Corino (4:08)

And then you mentioned that your son Adam is using AI in some really fascinating ways on your podcast. He described this project that he worked on, you know, sorting through these kind of archival antiquities documents in Egypt. Here's what he said.

Adam el Kaliouby (4:25)

What I realized is that if you're able to feed all of the historical archival context to the AI, it will be able to translate and transcribe these documents much more accurately. I built a platform which I'm calling Taroth, which means heritage in Arabic.

It basically builds a system prompt where then you can upload your documents and then get more accurate transcriptions and translations. I've been using it for myself because now I'm able to actually search through all of these different Arabic documents that I would have never been able to look at.