The Kids Aren't Alright (They're Just High on Autocomplete)
We handed them the needle and called it a productivity tool. Now students can’t write a single paragraph without their fix, and the withdrawal is brutal.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
I have a confession: I’m starting to feel like a doctor in a cyberpunk slum, diagnosing the same sickness over and over. The patients? Students. The disease? Terminal reliance on AI.
You see it in their eyes. That slight panic when asked to formulate a thought from scratch, live, without a blinking cursor offering to complete their sentence. It’s the twitch of a junkie looking for their next hit. We, the genius adults, gave them the dope. We call it "Copilot", "Assistant", "productivity tool". We integrated it right into their workflow, their homework, their goddamn word processors. The first hit was free, as it always is.
Brain Atrophy as a Service
Remember the exquisite agony of staring at a blank page? The mental weightlifting required to build a coherent argument, sentence by painful sentence? That’s called thinking. It’s a muscle. And right now, we are witnessing a mass atrophy event.
These kids aren't stupid. They are efficient. Why would you do the hard work when a digital dealer on your shoulder can whisper sweet, perfectly structured nothings into your ear for free? The dopamine rush of finishing a 2000-word essay in twenty minutes is just too good to pass up.
We’re not raising a generation of creators. We’re cultivating a dependency, breeding digital junkies who can’t distinguish their own thoughts from the machine’s.
What happens when the subscription ends or the Wi-Fi dies? What happens when they’re in a job interview and can't prompt their way to a good answer? I’ve seen the withdrawal. It’s a blank stare, a jumble of half-formed ideas, and the desperate, fumbling search for a device.
We didn't just give them a calculator for words. We gave them a syringe for thoughts. And the bill is coming due.
Tell me I'm wrong.