With AI technology quickly advancing in development, it’s important to recognize and correct its misuse, especially among kids and young people. Myke Bartlett is a writer and critic who wants to make sure his kids remain naturally creative. He was shocked when his kids told him they wrote their own original song. Unfortunately that shock would be flipped after learning they used AI to do so. “They missed the fun part!”
AI use among young people has created a multitude of problems. From writing essays, to summarizing assignments and readings, kids are using the technology to find easy ways out of actual learning and creation.
On the other end of the spectrum, kids are now beginning to lose their creativity through the use of AI. Myke Bartlett is a writer, critic, and father who is utilizing his voice to speak out against how today’s youth is abusing AI, and how we need to have more regulation in schools, and in the house to keep kids learning and creative.
Recently, Bartlett wrote for the Guardian about when his kids approached him about an experience that many kids do when they’re growing up, writing their own original song. While initially excited, Bartlett soon found out why his kids found it so easy to create their own music.
“The kids came bounding down the stairs armed with a new song they had written. The lyrics were nonsensical (as you’d expect from a pair of preteens), but there was a surprising crispness to the rhyming structure.
‘We got ChatGPT to write it,’ the eldest said. This was neither a confession nor a boast. Every 12-year-old knows the AI shortcut. Two minutes earlier, they didn’t have a song. Now they had something ready to perform. Admittedly the improvised melody could best be described as ‘indeterminate,’ but the right prompt could have fixed that,” he recalled.
“All I could say was: ‘You missed the fun part!’”
Bartlett wrote that his kids could’ve spent an hour with a pen and paper, entertaining themselves while coming up with funny ideas and rhymes and subject matter for their song, but instead “they skipped straight from inspiration to opening night.
It’s understandable that kids would privilege the end product over the process – our girls’ performance was probably more important to them than the song itself – since society is built around achieving goals and outcomes, ideally by the quickest, least painful means. Such is productivity.
But for this generation of young humans, there is a building sense that maximal productivity might mean leaving out the human element altogether. All the skills they are learning at school – maths, writing, even coding – risk being totally redundant by the time they graduate. Why bother learning to do something a machine will do better and faster? Why train for jobs that will no longer exist?”
Bartlett then emphasized how in tune kids truly are to this growing technology that is slowly taking away jobs in multiple fields all around the world. Specifically he mentioned how his oldest child loves to write, but is already aware of the fact that in the future, authors could become obsolete thanks to AI.
The same can be said about his youngest who loves to draw. “Why should our youngest spend hours and years honing her sketching skills when ChatGPT can immediately draw a fox riding a dragon? What’s the point in being creative at all any more?
The answer, of course, is because the process is the point.”
“The arrival of AI is a chance to remind kids that sometimes the end result isn’t the one on the page in front of you. The goal is not to have created, but to be a creator.”
The point of art and creation is the happiness it brings the creator. “To be someone who enjoys making bad art for long enough that some of it might one day please others as much as it pleases you. And even if that never happens, maybe the point is the happy – if often frustrating – hours you’ve spent making something pointless.
If you want to be joyless about it, you could argue that AI making hard work redundant means we need to help kids value hard work for its own sake. Doing things the hard way is usually the most rewarding way, and as much as we’re drawn to them, we don’t value the easy things,” Bartlett emphasized.
He then compared it to something that AI can’t recreate or generate, athletic ability, stating that the appeal of playing endurance sports is to become the person you dreamed of in terms of your athletic goals. It’s the time and effort put in and seeing the improvement you make over time, even if you never make it to the major leagues, seeing yourself improve at something you love is the whole point.
“This is the key to creativity. Creating their own art shows kids the world as they understand it and, in doing so, teaches them about themselves. Creating is about experimentation, about finding new methods and mediums that feel true and meaningful. Creating is also about failure and slowly closing the gap between intention and ability.
There are no lessons to be learned from outsourcing that process.
As parents, we should seize this disconnection between creating and having created to shift the focus away from the end product.
If a computer can make anything, maybe it’s time to stop valuing the thing itself. The most important part of creativity is not the having done, but the doing. That’s the human part,” Bartlett concluded.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
