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

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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 the study became emotionally dependent on the chatbot’s company. So, if you want to spend time fostering better connections with your family, generative AI should be near the bottom of your list of essential tools to learn.

Instead, stay up to speed on your basic software-enabled communication skills like texting, emailing, video calling, and the proper uses of social media. Keeping these skills sharp may help you feel more connected online, both through direct communication with your family members and your more complete awareness of what the grandkids are doing day to day.

If you want to experiment with AI tools, I’d recommend using them with your family members for education and entertainment. When ChatGPT first came out in 2022 and I was visiting my parents for the holidays, we had a wonderful time trying it out together, making funny poems, and refining prompts just to see what the AI could do. If your grandkids are really into using this type of software, then asking if they could spend 30 minutes the next time you’re together in person playing around with the tool could be an enjoyable bonding experience.

If you’re not the fastest typer, you may find the voice options for inputting prompts into the chatbot more comfortable to use. ChatGPT’s voice mode is entertaining to chat with, though it will likely feel quite odd at first. I mean, how do you strike up a conversation with a piece of software? But once you get used to voice mode, it can be fun to ask it to teach you phrases in different languages. Before traveling to Japan last year, I spent hours and hours practicing speaking Japanese with ChatGPT. It’s not a perfect tutor, but I found the process to be quite enjoyable.

One thing to keep in mind is that chatbots often fabricate information or spit out search results that contain inaccuracies. This can happen when you’re doing web searches to gather specific information, or when you ask the chatbot a general question. The wrong answers given by these generative AI tools can sound quite confident, so you’re better off doing some additional digging to verify what it told you. When you’re doing this double-checking, you may realize there’s not much you can get from ChatGPT today that you couldn’t find through a simple Google search.

Another detail worth remembering: It’s not alive. Even if you feel impressed with the quality of the answers or get an uncanny feeling that it’s more than just a software program talking to you, remind yourself that chatbots are massive tools that memorize the patterns of human writing and interactions with the intention of mimicking them. The mimicry may be stunning, but the expressions are ultimately hollow.

Let’s get back to your worries about staying connected to family. Take a moment and genuinely think about your relationship with your grandkids. They hopefully love you for who you are, and what kind of software you use or avoid shouldn’t have any impact on that. I feel like life is far too short to be caught up in our anxieties about how others view us. As soon as you finish this article, give them a call (or send them an Instagram DM) and tell them how you feel as well as how important family is to you. Do it now. I promise it’s worth it. Besides, you already know what to say to them—no chatbot needed here.