, Columnist
AI Is About to Transform Childhood. Are We Ready?
In the future, middle-class kids will learn from, play with and grow attached to their own personalized AI chatbots.
Making friends.
Photographer: GREG BAKER/AFPThis article is for subscribers only.
With the introduction of GPT-4 and Claude, AI has taken another big step forward. GPT-4 is human-level or better at many hard tasks, a huge improvement over GPT-3.5, which was released only a few months ago. Yet amid the debate over these advances, there has been very little discussion of one of the most profound effects of AI large language models: how they will reshape childhood.
In the future, every middle-class kid will grow up with a personalized AI assistant — so long as the parents are OK with that.