Notes From the Dinnertable
My teenage niece has decided she hates ChatGPT. She mentions it often, usually with some attitude. She’s also thinking hard about what to study, and the thought process has been interesting to watch. Art and design were what she always wanted to do, but according to her, those industries are about to be flooded with AI slop, so maybe she should pick something else. Something safer, something that’ll survive. Like nursing or something physical and care related, is what she’s thinking about lately.
Now, in my opinion the flood she’s worried about is real. But the conclusion she’s drawing from it is the part I want to push back on.
The Pew Research Centre put out a study earlier this year that showed nearly two-thirds of US teens use AI chatbots, and about a third use them for most of their schoolwork. At the same time, when teens who feel negatively about AI are asked why, the second most common answer, after overreliance, is jobs. The BBC’s Bitesize careers survey this year found about a third of UK teenagers worried AI would take jobs away from them, and a similar share thought it would shrink the opportunities available to them. So they’re using the thing they’re afraid of, daily, while at the same time deciding it’s coming for them.
What’s getting lost in all this is what the actual trade is when a teenager gives up on art because she’s scared of the technology. It might feel to her like she’s choosing safety over risk, but what she’s really trading is the one thing she’s been building for years, which is taste, for a guess about which industries will still look the way they do today in 2030. Five-year industry forecasts are not a thing anyone has ever been good at, and the people pushiest about which careers are safe right now tend to be people whose own careers were never even in the conversation. If you’ve never had to wonder whether your job will exist, your advice on the topic is worth roughly what you paid for it.
The thing I keep coming back to is that creative industries have been reshaped by tool shifts before and the people who came through them weren’t the ones who predicted which jobs would survive. Photography didn’t kill painting. It made portrait painting a different kind of choice, and the painters who kept going did so for different reasons. Photoshop didn’t kill illustration. It killed a particular version of the workflow and rewarded illustrators who had something to say. The difference between those two groups was taste, and taste is the one thing that takes years to build and can only be built by caring about something long enough to develop an opinion about it.
AI is really good at the mechanical layer of creative work. It can produce a decent image or a passable draft. What it can’t do, and has shown no sign of being able to do, is know which of the things it produces is any good. That judgement still sits with a person. And the person who has it is almost always someone who spent years caring about the craft before they had any commercial reason to.
So when a seventeen-year-old who genuinely loves design decides to walk away from it because she’s afraid of AI slop, the thing she’s giving up isn’t an industry. It’s the years of apprenticeship that would have made her one of the people the industry still needs on the other side of this. The slop is real, and likely the flood will be real. But the people who can tell good from bad in the flood are the ones who built taste before the flood ever started, and those people are going to be in short supply. She could be one of them. But walking away because of fear is the one move that guarantees she won’t be.
I didn’t say most of this to her. I said some of it, vaguely, over dinner, and she made it abundantly clear I wasn’t even close to convincing her of anything. I can’t say I’m 100% sure of what the future will look like, exactly, but I do know that the young people deciding their own futures right now are doing it in an environment where everyone has an agenda. The tech companies want them excited, the doomers want them terrified and suspicious, the trade schools see a recruitment opportunity, and almost no one is telling them the boring truth, which is that this is going to be uneven and weird and that the only thing they can really control is how good they get at the thing they’re drawn to.
She’ll figure it out. They all will, on some level. I just hope the ones with taste don’t talk themselves out of using it.