Who’d be a teenager in an AI world? Michael Tubb trawls through centuries of moral panics about how technology and media are making our kids stupid.
AI is rotting our teenagers’ brains. I read it online.
I guess it makes sense. Outsourcing your writing exclusively to a large language model means outsourcing your thinking too. We’ve all seen the industry reports or LinkedIn posts that look plausible at first glance but fall apart when you dig a little deeper. So it makes sense to me that schools and universities are looking at interventions like reintroducing the viva voce, where students explain their theses or dissertations in person.
And yet…
Two years ago, wasn’t it TikTok and YouTube that were causing the brain rot for our kids? In 2008, The Atlantic magazine was asking “Is Google making us stupid?” Remember how, as mobile phone use became widespread, we worried that textspeak and emojification were damaging teen literacy?
And when I was my teenage son’s age, the screen-based danger was “getting square eyes”, the standard late-20th-century analysis of what would happen if you spent too long in front of a TV.
How much screen time?
Today, the equivalent of square eyes is the concept of too much screen time, and not only because the world has long since gone 16:9.
Excess screen time has been blamed for all manner of childhood issues, including depression, behavioural problems and sleep deprivation, with neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield in 2011 controversially saying that internet use and computer games could harm children’s brains.
But in 2015 an editorial in The BMJ argued that Greenfield’s claims were “not based on a fair scientific appraisal of the evidence” and were “misleading to parents and the public”. Pete Etchells, a psychology professor at Bath Spa University, wrote in his 2024 book Unlocked that the scientific evidence around outcomes of screen time is far from clear cut, and often relies on correlation rather than causation.
To be clear, some concerns around screens are absolutely valid. Endless algorithm-led scrolling, worries around online safety, and certain behavioural problems are very real issues in our world today. Pretending they don’t exist is as lazy as pretending all screen time is harmful. But why should harmful be the expectation?
Unfamiliar or unhealthy?
Almost every weekend, for hours on end, you’ll find my fiancée, my son and me (alias MT_Threatz) dropping in from the Fortnite Battle Bus and trying desperately not to get squad-wiped by an elite group of 10-year-olds with the speed and reflexes of a cheetah hunting a gazelle across the Serengeti.
My son is our IGL (in-game leader). As a young boy, he watched an awful lot of YouTube gaming streams and played a large amount of video games. Gaming doesn’t seem to have rotted his brain.
As a child, he spoke clearly, confidently, and early. He read fluently ahead of his peers and began writing short stories. Teachers, as well as family and friends, would comment on how articulate he was, and how easily he expressed himself.
Context is key
The “how much screen time?” question I’ve heard across his childhood comes from a panicked assumption that screen time is bad. All screen time isn’t equal. Doomscrolling through algorithmic sludge is not the same as playing a multiplayer co-op game with your friends or family: communicating, planning, laughing, failing, and trying again.
Indeed, one of the common arguments against gaming is that it affects social skills. All this tells me is that those arguing have never played a multiplayer game. Fortnite isn’t isolating, it’s a masterclass in communication and collaboration.
Our family trio is constantly negotiating where to land, when to W key (aggressively push another team), who’s carrying heals, when to run. And we fail… a lot. Often unfairly, sometimes because one of us (me) panicked and did something stupid.
But that failure loop is a gift. Videogames teach us to lose, often publicly, to reset, and go again, without it becoming a personal crisis. They teach emotional resilience. And I get to see how my son reacts under pressure. I can literally hear it on comms. That’s far more intel than I generally get from the standard response of “fine” to my question “how was school?”.
Because gaming is full of spoken language. Commentary. Explanation. Hypothesis. Emotion. It’s language in use, all the time. If you swapped the delivery format and called it immersive narrative learning, people would lap it up and start marching on Whitehall to get it on the curriculum.
But because it arrives via a console rather than a book, we discount it. Even if it might be the perfect training for your forthcoming university viva.
And gaming content is dense with text. Menus, maps, instructions, objectives, upgrades, subtitles and chat. The brain is decoding text constantly. That’s literacy.
Gaming didn’t replace reading in our house. It broadened it.
Out now!
This August, American neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath published The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Children’s Learning – and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Well, OK, but there’s always something, isn’t there? Classroom technology. Rock ’n’ roll. Video nasties. Rave culture.
Fifty years ago Action comic (The sensational paper for boys. Every Monday. 7p.) was withdrawn from sale in British newsagents because the media thought it was damaging to children’s morals.
Two hundred years earlier, a piece in the Monthly Mirror had declared that reading novels was a contemporary cause of “female depravity”.
And two millennia before, Socrates wondered if reading anything – the very invention of writing itself – was doing damage to human memory.
The media panics are arriving at increasing speed, like summer heatwaves and prime ministers, but they’ve always been there.
I think we mistake the unfamiliar for the unhealthy, comparing now with then, and declaring the present as broken, just because it doesn’t match what we remember. Personally, I’m backing the next generation against the evils of gaming, AI, emojis and screens. Even if they all end up with square eyes.
