Teen boys are using ChatGPT as their wingman. What could go wrong?
TL;DR
While ChatGPT might help some kids in some circumstances, teens of all genders need a more reliable support system — one that doesn’t require an electricity-guzzling data center to answer a question. | Azurhino/Getty Images It’s not necessarily the guys you might expect, Apollo Knapp told me. These are 6-foot-tall high-school athletes, guys who are social and popular. “They’re the type of people that are friends with everybody, who get dapped up in the hallway every two feet,” said Knapp, an 18-year-old high school senior in Ohio and a board member at sexual violence prevention nonprofit SafeBAE. But at his school, these are the guys using AI to help them talk to girls. They’ll paste their texts into ChatGPT for feedback before sending, he said. Or, they’ll send their own photos to ChatGPT and ask, “am I cute?” Or, they’ll simply ask for moral support when they’re “too scared, maybe, to.
Nauti's Take
Watching popular teens lean on ChatGPT for flirty encouragement proves we have not built privacy-respecting, offline conversation scaffolds; we are outsourcing moral support to electricity-guzzling clouds while expecting schools to cover the mentorship gap.
Summary
While ChatGPT might help some kids in some circumstances, teens of all genders need a more reliable support system — one that doesn’t require an electricity-guzzling data center to answer a question. | Azurhino/Getty Images It’s not necessarily the guys you might expect, Apollo Knapp told me.
These are 6-foot-tall high-school athletes, guys who are social and popular. “They’re the type of people that are friends with everybody, who get dapped up in the hallway every two feet,” said Knapp, an 18-year-old high school senior in Ohio and a board member at sexual violence prevention nonprofit SafeBAE.
But at his school, these are the guys using AI to help them talk to girls. They’ll paste their texts into ChatGPT for feedback before sending, he said.
Or, they’ll send their own photos to ChatGPT and ask, “am I cute? ” Or, they’ll simply ask for moral support when they’re “too scared, maybe, to
Sources