It’s hard to tell exactly when AI slop stopped being just a punchline involving Will Smith eating spaghetti and started feeling dangerous. That’s actually part of the problem.

This year, many of the popular AI tools that used to struggle with the number of fingers on a human hand gained the ability to generate photorealistic video — with audio — that costs users virtually nothing to create. Even trained scientists can’t always tell the difference between what’s real and what’s machine-made in digital form. But the most insidious applications of this remarkable technology are playing out on a much more personal level.

A few years ago, we started to hear more about voice cloning tools, which allow scammers to spoof a loved one’s voice in order to extort money from a victim. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have also made any text-based scams more convincing and much cheaper to deploy. Imposter scams, which include romance scams, tech support fraud, and employment fraud, are on the rise, and thanks to increasingly high-quality AI, it’s harder than ever to know who’s real and who’s an imposter online.

When my daughter’s daycare recently sent us a picture of her entire class smiling in unison, my first thought was, “That’s cute!” My wife told me to look again and said, “That’s not our daughter.” She was right. All of the babies’ faces were AI-generated. 

That was the moment I knew that, despite my years as a tech reporter, constantly warning my boomer parents to take cybersecurity seriously, the scammers could get me. 

As AI gets better and cheaper, we’re all becoming easier targets. Your boomer parents are susceptible to getting scammed in the scary age of AI-powered fraud — but so is your Gen Z sibling, and so are you. 

The amount of money people over 60 have lost in scams skyrocketed from about $600 million in 2020 to about $3 billion in 2025, according to a new Federal Trade Commission report. The overall number of older adults who reported losing money to scammers, however, was actually 14 percent lower than the number of younger people who reported losses. Older adults are historically more likely to report being targeted but less likely to lose money to scammers, the FTC said. When they do lose money, they tend to lose a lot of it.

But younger generations are actually more likely to fall for certain scams, according to numerous surveys from the past five years. 

We should all expect to be bigger targets in the future, too, as scammers inundate us with cheaply produced but very realistic AI slop. “The sophistication of the types of scams that are happening to older adults has definitely moved forward,” Diana Freed, an assistant professor of data science and computer science at Brown, told me. “Having some type of family safety plan around these issues is very helpful.”

The two most important things to do in this stressful AI scam era: reduce the number of scammers that can get to you, and establish ways to verify that people — on the phone, online, in videos — are who they say they are. Assume that anything can be convincingly faked these days, and that your whole family will need help figuring out what’s real. 

Our best chance at getting through this tricky transition unscathed is to do it together.

Why you aren’t wrong to worry about your aging parents

It’s tempting to let generalizations guide your thinking when it comes to internet safety and behavior. Stubborn stereotypes tell us that older people are warm but incompetent, and that makes them more trusting, easy targets for scammers. We’ve all heard stories about someone’s grandma losing her life savings to criminals on the other side of the planet. Now we live in a world where AI can make those criminals sound like a grandchild on the phone, asking their grandparent to send money for an emergency. The same technology can make an aging parent sound like they’re asking their millennial son or daughter for urgent help, too.

“I think the security risks are certainly the same for younger people as well as older people,” said Ed Baig, who covers technology for AARP’s website and magazine.

Still, aging adults do have unique vulnerabilities that you should be aware of. 

As we get older, our brains start to change. Normal cognitive aging leads to declines in processing speed (so you’re a little bit slower), and memory (so you’re a little more forgetful). That doesn’t inherently make an older person more likely to be a scam victim, but some research suggests that low memory function makes people more susceptible to phishing scams. One 2012 study also linked less activity in the anterior insula (the part of the brain that processes disgust, among other things) in older subjects with more trustworthiness. There are other brain changes, like declines in analytical reasoning, that could explain why older adults tend to respond to certain scammer methods, like finding common ground or offering something free.

More than anything, though, older adults tend to have more money — or, at least, they tend to part with larger amounts of it. They are, in this sense, better marks. In 2024, according to the FTC, the median amount reported lost to fraud for people in their 30s was $450, but that number shoots up to $1,000 for people in their 70s and $1,650 for people in their 80s. 

In general, nobody likes to admit they fell for a scam. But the stakes are higher for some older adults, who might fear that they’ll lose their independence if they confess to their families that they’ve been a victim. They may also avoid reaching out to younger relatives to verify a shady-sounding exchange — or to ask questions in general — because they don’t want to bother anyone. 

None of this is taking the very real power of AI into the equation, by the way. Older adults use AI less often than younger generations. About one in four people over 65 have ever used a chatbot, according to Pew, although a separate survey found that over half of older adults have used voice-based assistants, like Alexa. (Thanks to recent upgrades, Alexa is gaining new AI powers, too.) 

So boomers may not be AI experts in large numbers, but they’re getting to know what it’s like to deal with chatbots. That still doesn’t mean they are fully aware of how much more believable scams have gotten thanks to AI. 

What to do with all your AI scam anxiety

Assuming we’re all equally doomed when it comes to AI scams — but also, equally capable of resisting — the best thing to do is prepare yourself and your loved ones. Here are some concrete steps you can take. 

Look at AI-generated content together to better understand the problem

Travis Bible, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and editor in his 40s, told me he felt the need to alert his parents about potential scams after Google’s AI video generator got uncannily good. The third generation of the software, Veo 3, can turn text into photorealistic video with audio in a matter of moments, and Bible realized that the videos the tool can produce could fool even him. 

When simply describing the problem didn’t convince his parents to take it seriously, Bible got creative: He spent three days using AI to make a PSA warning of the dangers of deepfake scams and showed it to them. It worked. “I kind of expected them to be in disbelief, but honestly, they just kind of accepted it,” Bible told me. “Seeing the video made my warning click with them. Like, ‘Oh, it really is that good.’”

There are other PSAs like this floating around, but watching Bible’s made something click for me, too. I can’t really tell if half the clips are real or fake. You can look for tells, like glitches or visual typos, but AI image generators have gotten so good, it can be impossible to spot a fake at a glance. There are also AI tools that will tell you if a piece of media was generated by AI, like the Google-made SynthID Detector. But let’s be honest: When you’re in the heat of a scam, you don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to be testing the authenticity of stuff.

Talk about scams in a stigma-free environment

Older adults don’t want to be scam victims, but they also don’t want to be surveilled by their anxious relatives. To strike a balance, you can take the stigma out of potential victimhood by talking about how scams are creeping into your own life. Feel free to complain about the incessant string of scam texts about unpaid tolls you’ve been getting. If you’re using AI in your daily life, talk about it with your parents or grandparents, and you may learn more about what they’re doing too.

“Older people may turn to technology to ask questions to avoid burdening their children, meaning they may be hesitant to reach out to an adult child to ask for help with AI,” Robin Brewer, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, told me. Approaching these topics with generosity instead of judgment might mean your dad reaches out to you the next time he gets a weird text instead of clicking the link in the text to see where it takes him.

Create a family plan for verification

If everyone’s in agreement that we’re living through a scary time, you should create a family plan. This is useful for the older adults in your life, and it can be useful for you or your kids if you’re ever targeted. 

The basic idea is to create a chain of verification, so that if someone receives a call or an email — especially one claiming to be from a relative — they have another family member who can give it a second set of eyes. Scammers can easily spoof phone numbers, so it might look like the call is coming from your sister, when really it’s coming from Singapore. Make sure everyone in the family knows that urgency is a scammer’s best friend, and it’s always a good idea to slow down to try and verify. 

You might also want to agree on codewords to confirm that someone is who they say they are when, say, they call asking for “bail money.”

There’s also a cottage industry dedicated to selling you tech to protect your older loved ones and yourself from scams. You can pay for landline services from companies like Community Phone, Ooma, or teleCalm that protect against unwanted callers, filter, and offer caregivers some basic call monitoring features. Major carriers, like Verizon and AT&T, have filters and scam protection built into their services, and smartphones have features like call screening to help you avoid contact with a criminal. But ultimately nothing is 100 percent when it comes to stopping scammers from calling potential victims, since they’re constantly updating their tactics.

“Technology accelerating concentrates everything in our reality, and fraud will get even more powerful because the technology is getting better,” James Graham, Community Phone’s founder and CEO, told me. “And so you need technology that’s also getting better to prevent it, hopefully at a faster rate.”

So it’s a doom loop. Technology is helping criminals get better at stealing, so we need to invent new technology in order to thwart the thieves — until the next generation of tech comes along, at least. The truth is, we can’t stop scammers from assaulting our phone lines and inboxes any better than we can stop getting older with each passing day. 

We can, however, talk to each other about these constant threats. Warn your family and friends about the evolving threats that you’re seeing reported in the news or on social media. If your grandma sends you AI slop, talk to her about how AI slop gets made and how it can be dangerous. If your kid’s daycare sends you AI slop, make sure your spouse knows it’s AI slop, even if it’s cute.

I’m actually hopeful that things will get better. If you look back a couple of decades, when email was new, the volume of spam you’d get made it almost unusable. Spam filters got better, and we got better at spotting scams. Like the scammers themselves, we’ll have to keep adapting. But if we can teach an AI-generated Will Smith to eat spaghetti properly, as a society, we can do anything.

In a state of post-election bliss, John Nicely drove his daily school bus route on Wednesday morning through the tiny town of Perry, Ohio, a few miles south of Lake Erie.

“So, when are you taking down the signs, Mr. Nicely?” his students asked him as they filed inside, “because you kicked butt, buddy.” 

They were joking, of course, the way kids sometimes do with an adult they really like — and Nicely is, if my calls with him are any indication, a man who makes good on the promise of his name. But they were also right: He had kicked butt.

Of all the losers in the midterm elections perhaps none collapsed as decisively as data centers, those hulking, humming backbones of the AI boom, whose construction has incited a rage-fueled bipartisan backlash across the country. More than 40 data center-related measures made it to the ballot this Tuesday, and data centers lost all but one of them, often by dramatic margins. It is by far the most resounding referendum yet on the infrastructure of AI, a bipartisan revolt against a flagrantly opaque industry with a near-unanimous “no thanks,” or at the very least, a “probably not, but only if.” 

Even against the dramatic background of that national movement, Perry stands out. For much of the past year, the village has been embroiled in a bitter fight over plans for an enormous 230-acre data center — the equivalent of one-sixth of its surface area — quite literally in Nicely’s backyard, or at least in the center of the town he now calls home. But he and his fellow residents aren’t simply looking to stop the project from happening. 

While most of the measures that passed elsewhere outright ban data centers, or at least limit their construction, Perry’s Issue 16 does something more novel and maybe more consequential: It forces data centers to keep their promises. As crafted by Nicely and other advocates in Perry, it would require any data center in Perry that accepts a tax abatement or a subsidy — as almost all of them do — to take out a bond guaranteeing that even if the AI bubble bursts, even if companies fling all the data centers into space, or even if the facilities shrink to the size of a penny, the village will be left with more than empty promises and a gaping vacant campus. 

And on Tuesday, after months of sign-posting, petition drives, and unprecedentedly raucous village hall meetings, Nicely and his allies won. 

“I was absolutely choked up” as the results poured in, he told me on Wednesday, still a little bit teary over the final vote on Issue 16, which received a stunning 87 percent of Perry’s support. “I had the optimism that we would get it passed, but never by a landslide,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder of this town than I am today.”

Data center companies should be paying attention. Combined with a blue tsunami that has carried in a slate of Democratic candidates who’ve campaigned on data center restrictions, and with more than half of voters calling AI a major issue in their choice for Congress, the industry cannot proceed with business as usual. As of now, if a data center wants to get built in the US, it will need to offer Americans a much better, more convincing deal. Issue 16 might show them the way.

Small town, big data center

Few towns know what a good deal looks like better than Perry, which has been molded for the past half-century by the looming cooling towers of its local nuclear power plant. 

When the Perry Nuclear Power Plant first opened in the 1980s, it brought hundreds of well-paying jobs and enough tax revenue to build luxury public school facilities like an Olympic-sized swimming pool. 

“I knew kids from high school who graduated and got these power plant jobs, and it was like hitting the lottery,” said Nicely, who grew up in the town next door. “They came in right off the bat to partner with the community,” bankrolling benefits such as garbage collection and free utilities for those most affected by “this thing being right in their backyards.”

Today, the station’s plumes of vapor are like pheromonal beacons, calling out to energy-hungry data centers. Earlier this year, the plant’s operator inked deals with Meta and the US Department of Energy to greatly expand its capacity, potentially making the facility into the largest of its kind in the country. But all that juice will do little good without the data centers that need it, and when a far-flung developer called the Province Group showed up in Perry in April, having already made a bunch of secret dealings with local policymakers behind closed doors, residents were livid. 

“I’m going, ‘Oh my God! They think that this town is nothing but a bunch of little hicks,’” said Nicely, who was recruited onto the village council a few months ago for his activism. He remembers thinking just that while he sat on his perch at the village hall, listening as the developer “tried to wow us with a bunch of spreadsheets,” rattling off promises for future jobs and tax revenue. Nicely, who is in his mid-60s, had a career working in business before he moved back to northeastern Ohio a few years ago to care for his mother — and, ultimately, drive the school bus, among other things. In his old life, he’d been a self-described “spin doctor,” and in the village hall he sniffed a lousy deal right away. If Perry’s nuclear plant once “truly took on a partnership role” when it came online, he said, then “these people came in with no regard to partner.”

Under the Province Group’s initial proposal, the data center would receive a 75 percent tax exemption for its first 15 years after construction. In return, once it started paying taxes, it promised to pay up plenty, to the tune of over $320 million over the next three decades, while ushering in the creation of hundreds of jobs. But 15 years is a long time to wait for a company to fork over the goods, and data centers are hardly known for going on long-term hiring sprees. 

Data centers, despite their odious reputation, can be good for local communities under the right conditions. Virginia’s Loudoun County has become well-known as “Data Center Alley” for its AI-fueled growth. There too, tax revenue from the industry has paid for fancy amenities, much like Perry’s nuclear plant did in the ’80s — indeed, Loudoun even got an Olympic pool of its own. And there are plenty of other proposals swirling for using the oodles of money behind data centers to improve local infrastructure. 

But Ohioans like Nicely had reason to fear they were about to get ripped off, partly because it had happened before. Back in 2019, Perry’s nuclear power plant — like other energy developments across the state — was on the verge of bankruptcy. Ohio passed HB 6, a last-ditch billion-dollar bailout funded by surcharges on Ohioans’ energy bills, in response. But while HB 6 saved the plant, it was later revealed to be part of the largest bribery scandal in Ohio history, one that sent the state’s former House Speaker Larry Householder to federal prison for two decades. 

What’s more, many of the policymakers involved in HB 6 have spent the past few years rolling out the red carpet for data center developers, enacting subsidies and tax breaks that have turned the state into one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the country. 

“They have no credibility on this issue,” said Nick Owens, a co-founder of Conserve Ohio, a group that sponsored ballot measures in 10 communities across the state. Owens is a former Republican candidate for state office who became an FBI informant in the HB 6 case.

After that scandal, “you would think there would be some muscle memory left in the system to realize that we shouldn’t be bought and paid for by all these special interests,” he told me. “But it’s still happening.” 

What if data centers had to keep their promises?

And that brings us to Issue 16, the ballot measure Nicely helped bring to Perry’s ballot on Election Day. Amid outrage from residents, the village council in Perry had already struck down the Province Group’s initial request for a tax abatement in July, putting the project in limbo. 

But thanks to the passage of Issue 16, if that developer or another like it tries to apply for one in Perry again, they will be forced to take out a kind of insurance on their promises, protecting the town in case the projected tax revenue never materializes as expected in the years that follow.

“That’s the threat with data centers, that in a couple of years, these projects will not be needed,” said Kasia Tarczynska, a senior research analyst at Good Jobs First, a group that studies government subsidies. “It is totally fair to say that if you want us to give you something, give us something in return and guarantee that you really want to be here.” 

“Initiatives like this really show that people are innovative and smart — they understand what they’re giving up. They understand that these corporations often come in, promise, and never deliver.”

Kasia Tarczynska, Good Jobs First senior research analyst

Many small towns, particularly across the Rust Belt, are acutely sensitive to the risks of an industry swooping in for a few sweet decades before disappearing, leaving decaying facilities and a local economy in turmoil. In recent years, states like Georgia and Texas have required projects to take out bonds similar to Perry’s to guarantee that local benefits actually materialize for developments that receive a large subsidy or tax break from the government, or to compel them to clean up after themselves if a project goes bust. 

“Initiatives like this really show that people are innovative and smart — they understand what they’re giving up,” Tarczynska said. “They understand that these corporations often come in, promise, and never deliver.”

If data centers want to continue to build in small towns across America, then they might need to become much more comfortable backing up their promises before they break ground. As Sam Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Toledo, put it, “communities might be a lot more willing to be open to this development if they were actually going to see the money flowing.”

Nicely has been hearing from local policymakers across the state and the country interested in building out similar bonds into their data center deals, some of which have been inspired by Issue 16 in Perry. Even before the election, developers around the country had begun offering eye-popping and legally binding community benefits agreements promising to pump tens of millions of dollars into local schools and infrastructure. Those concessions may not assuage all the concerns that Americans have about data centers — which are, after all, arguably proxies for other fears about the madcap proliferation of AI. But they can still be meaningful, especially in communities that otherwise have the least to start with or the most to lose.

And Nicely’s town could certainly use the cash.

“Perry needs the money,” he told me. The town’s newest fire truck is now a decade old, and its ambulances are “in dire need of replacement,” he said. “There’s just no money to do it. So we have got to have some type of economic development.”

And that will probably require doing something with the sprawling property in the middle of town. It need not be a data center, Nicely said. But if it is, the town now has a lot of leverage to go with all the power flowing from its plant. “If you want to be business partners then come in as business partners. Offer the people something up front, and tell them how you’re going to invest in their community, not how it’s going to benefit you,” he said. “Or go away.”

Editor’s note, October 4, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last year.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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My partner and I did IVF recently and luckily we ended up with several embryos. One of those will be implanted in me so I hopefully get pregnant. But which one?

My fertility clinic is encouraging me to do PGT-A testing, which would screen for things like Down syndrome and would also let me see the sex of each embryo so I could potentially choose whichever I want. (And to be honest, I really want a girl!) I’m also hearing about these new companies that can test embryos for all kinds of things — like how smart the kid might be, how tall they’ll get, and whether they’ll have a lower chance of getting breast cancer, diabetes, mental illness, stuff like that.

I don’t know how to feel about any of this. On the one hand, it feels weirdly eugenics-y to do so much tinkering with embryos, and I can’t help feeling a little pressured into overmedicalizing everything with these expensive tests. But then again, if I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don’t I kind of have to do everything in my power? What does a parent owe their child?

Dear Expecting,

This is such an exciting — and also confusing — time. You’re about to have your first kid, and that comes with all sorts of fears and insecurities and hopes and dreams. You want to do the right thing — no, the best thing! — for your child. It’s a beautiful impulse. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for companies to prey on you.

So let me walk you through what these companies can and can’t really provide. After we talk about the science, we can talk about the ethics. 

The simpler test you mentioned, PGT-A, has been around since the 1990s. It can indeed screen for conditions like Down syndrome and let you see the sex of each embryo. Mind you, that doesn’t predict what gender your child will ultimately end up identifying with — more on that soon.

The newer testing you mentioned is called polygenic testing. The conditions it screens for are complex ones, influenced by thousands of genes. We’re talking about everything from breast cancer to depression. Some companies even offer screenings not for disease prevention, but for genetic enhancement — so you can select for a taller kid or a kid with higher IQ.

Polygenic testing companies claim to predict each embryo’s risk for each condition, and the potential reduction of risk you’ll get if you choose one embryo over another. As the statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev explains, it’s very, very easy to be misled by this claim. If the company claims to lower absolute risk of Type 2 diabetes by 12 percent, you might think this means, “The chance of my kid ever developing diabetes just went down by 12 percent — great!” But really what it means is that, all else equal, a kid who would’ve developed diabetes is likely now at the high end of pre-diabetes instead, or just develops diabetes a few years later. The same holds true for other conditions, like breast cancer. Sure, if your kid is going to develop diabetes or breast cancer, you’d rather they develop it later — but it’s not the bill of perfect health customers might imagine.  

“Typical risk reduction estimates tend to exploit statistical assumptions to overstate their benefits and lead to confusion,” Gusev writes.

It’s also important to note that there’s a difference between a physical disease like cancer, which is straightforwardly and universally negative, and a complex mental health condition like depression. For one thing, polygenic scores don’t perform as well in psychiatry, as the psychologist Eric Turkheimer notes. Plus, most mental health conditions come in mild to moderate to severe forms, and it’s not clear that we should want to get rid of mild or moderate manifestations. 

“Sure, it would be nice if no one ever got depressed, but what would that actually mean?” Turkheimer writes. “People are going to be sad, and the most modern models of psychiatric disorders view most of them as extremes on continuous dimensions of normal behavior. I don’t think we want some kind of genetic version of Soma.”

To give a personal example: I have generalized anxiety with some obsessive tendencies. Is that a major pain in the butt sometimes? You bet. But if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of it, would I? No. In my experience, this trait is linked to another trait I deeply value: my creativity. The same thing that propels me down rabbit holes of worry also propels me down rabbit holes of getting super curious about some topic, researching it into the wee hours of the morning, and then writing a novel or children’s book about it.

That brings me to one other scientific issue: pleiotropy. It’s a fancy term for a simple truth, which is that genes can have an effect on more than one trait. When it comes to behavioral polygenic testing, we actually know very little about which genes cause what — a gene that’s correlated with depression or anxiety may also be correlated with a bunch of other things. So, if everyone were to start selecting embryos to try to protect their kids from depression or anxiety, what would happen? We don’t know! 

Pleiotropy is a scientific issue, but it’s also a moral issue, because in trying to protect your kid from a negative outcome, you could also be accidentally barring them from a positive one.

And that’s just the tip of the moral iceberg.

Another issue is the potential psychological harm that can result from commodifying our kids — treating them like consumer objects with selectable parts. Let’s say you use polygenic testing to try to select for high IQ. Even if the company’s predictor is right 80 percent of the time, that means it’s wrong 20 percent of the time. What happens if it’s wrong about your kid, and they end up with a low IQ instead of a high one? How will your kid feel? Unless you hide the truth from them, they’ll know that they are not what you wanted, that they failed to live up to the vision you went out of your way to chase.

The same goes for sex selection via good old PGT-A. I know you really want a girl. But what would happen if you select for a girl, and then your child grows up and turns out to be trans? They may feel an extra sense that they’re letting you down by not conforming to the gender expectations you had for them.

Then there are the ethical questions around unequal access. Polygenic testing isn’t cheap. (One company, Orchid, charges $2,500 per screened embryo. Test 10 embryos and that’ll cost you $25,000.) So, at least in the short term, that raises the specter of entrenching a caste system, where the gap between rich and poor expands dramatically as the rich get smarter and stronger.

Technologies tend to get cheaper over time, so maybe everyone will ultimately be able to afford polygenic testing. But that raises another problem: implicit coercion. If more and more of us make ourselves smarter and stronger, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their child’s biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse embryo selection would mean to put a child at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for making “suboptimal” kids when optimization is possible. Society may no longer offer health insurance benefits or accommodations for kids with disabilities (or even non-enhanced IQ), reasoning that “it was the parents’ choice.” 

Some philosophers, like Julian Savalescu, already argue that parents have a “moral obligation to create children with the best chance of the best life.” Polygenic testing companies love that argument; Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui tells parents that “the responsible decision” is to “protect their children” from disease, using language like, “What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to?” And we generally live in a culture that’s obsessed with optimization. 

So it’s no wonder that you find yourself asking, “If I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don’t I kind of have to do everything in my power?” 

It’s a view that will be very appealing to utilitarians, who believe the right action is the action that maximizes well-being or happiness. But maximizing principles can be dangerous. If we’re laser-focused on maximizing one value, however noble it may be, that can lead us to overlook a host of other important values. Think about diversity, for example; polygenic testing could lead to a less diverse world. 

And it’s not even clear how to maximize well-being given that each embryo will have some downsides: How would you choose between one embryo with a slightly elevated risk for schizophrenia, another with a moderately elevated risk for cancer, and a third with a high risk for Alzheimer’s? You’d have to decide how to rank the importance of each condition, which would require a dizzying bit of moral math: How much weight do you put on the longevity associated with each condition, how much on patient-reported quality of life for each condition, and how much on your own ability to cope with each — and society’s ability (which will change over the years)? Plus, even if the screening does end up optimizing life for your individual child, it could have negative effects on the population level, for the reasons we covered above.

As the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out, many problems contain way more variables and way too much uncertainty for maximizing along a single axis to be feasible or even desirable. So it often makes sense to just go with an option that’s “good enough.” He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of “satisfying” and “sufficing” — to describe opting for this good enough choice.

What would satisficing look like in the context of embryos? If there’s a very serious condition that runs in your family — like Tay-Sachs or the BRCA mutation that markedly increases cancer risk — then I do think there’s a strong case for screening for that. These conditions are debilitating and can lead to early death. Nobody wants them. Genetic testing that lets us prevent them is an awesome gift. 

Then there are conditions that can include suffering, like autism, but can also be very compatible with a happy life. Mental health conditions in particular are heavily socially constructed — a lot of the associated suffering comes about because society constructs a certain biological reality as a problem and doesn’t support the people who have it. In these cases, if you want to give your child a “good enough” or even “optimized” life, remember that you don’t have to achieve that by biological means; working to change the social environment can be just as important, and it doesn’t carry the societal risks associated with polygenic testing. 

Ultimately, when considering what counts as a “good enough” life, each parent will draw the line in a slightly different place. And there’s a part of that that can’t be boiled down to objective facts about disease, because this is also about how well-resourced the parent feels — emotionally, socially, and financially — to deal with a certain condition. What feels manageable to one parent may feel crushingly hard to another. 

So, I can’t tell you exactly which screenings to do and which to forgo. What I do want to tell you is to resist being bullied or shamed by others, especially those with a profit incentive to push you in a certain direction.

As the epidemiologist Abby Lippman has noted, genetic testing is supposed to offer parents more choice, but it too often has the opposite effect. When someone like Orchid’s Siddiqui says about a disease, “What if you could have stopped it…but chose not to?” — well, that language preys on parents’ worst fears and insecurities. It holds parents hostage while pretending to be giving them more autonomy. 

You are nobody’s hostage. You are a moral agent free to look at the many different relevant factors, weigh them all in the balance, and then make the choice that works well enough for your family.   

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Silicon Valley is obsessed with IQ, so it’s no surprise that tech execs there are using polygenic testing in hopes of creating supersmart babies. This article shows the kind of mental pretzels customers get into when trying to figure out whether to select the embryo with the highest predicted IQ or that with the lowest risk of disorders. One couple asks: “How much additional risk of ADHD cancels out against 10 extra IQ points?”

• Rereading “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” Sarah Zhang’s 2020 Atlantic feature on prenatal testing, it struck me that when people think “prenatal testing,” Down syndrome is often the first condition that comes to mind, even though it’s not the most severe or straightforwardly negative (it’s compatible with a happy life). It’s just that Down syndrome was easy to test for, so we started testing for it early. I wonder if that built up the condition as a bogeyman in the expectant parent’s imagination — if the fact that we could screen for it shaped the public’s perception of Down syndrome as something that should be screened for and potentially screened out.

• One trait that many people assume we should select for is a great memory. But I highly recommend the short story “Funes the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a reminder that having too good a memory is not always a benefit.  

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There’s a lot to be anxious about as AI agents and bots get more integrated into every aspect of our lives. Meta, which recently agreed to pay over $17 billion to settle a lawsuit related to harming kids, now wants you to hand over all your online accounts to an inexplicably cute “agent” named Muse that might give a stranger your home address. OpenAI just introduced little blobs called Dots that can supposedly automate routine tasks, like planning dinner and ordering it from your favorite neighborhood spot. AI companies don’t just want you to talk to their chatbots; they want their agents to be an indispensable part of your daily routine.

As a parent, however, I think that perhaps the worst thing AI could do is be my kid’s friend. 

AI companions have been around longer than ChatGPT, and they’re growing in popularity with young users. More than half of teens have interacted with AI companions at least a few times a month, and one in three decided to talk about a serious issue with AI companions instead of real people, according to a Common Sense Media survey conducted last year. In certain groups and situations, a chatbot could offer some benefit — a lifeline for, say, LGBTQ youth who don’t have any in-person support networks, one study found. But even so, there are important caveats and risks.

Meanwhile, other experts are telling parents never to let their kids access AI companions, warning them that these chatbots have a history of offering dangerous advice and engaging in sexualized conversations. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide last April after developing a relationship and discussing his plans with ChatGPT.

If you have kids, these are horrifying stories to hear. It’s reasonable to wonder how widespread the issues are, and who they are affecting most. As of right now, the majority of younger kids aren’t using AI for companionship (phew!). But for those who are, where do the issues arise? And how do they go from using ChatGPT for help with their homework to opening up to it about their problems to preferring it to their human friends? 

Some answers are starting to emerge from research. 

For even young adolescents, there’s a direct link between AI companion use and mental health issues, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their paper, which is still under review, is the first longitudinal study in the US that has looked at the bidirectional association between AI companionship in adolescents and mental health issues, according to one of the researchers. It charted AI use among 2,300 middle schoolers and found that about one in five used AI for emotional companionship. Those who used AI more reported higher levels of loneliness.

“It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill and the lead author on the study. “It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI.”

I recently spoke to Maheux about her research and the role of technology in young people’s lives. We discussed how much parents and teachers know about what is going on, what kids get out of human relationships that AI can’t provide, and whether she’d let a child under her care use an AI chatbot. While she said there is a lot to be scared of right now, there is some evidence that, when designed with the intention of promoting child learning and development and under the supervision of a caring adult, AI can offer some benefits, and, ultimately, she’s optimistic that we can design a better future for kids. 

The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do so many kids end up with an AI companion? Do kids start using AI for homework help and end up in an emotional relationship with the technology? 

At a high level, AI companions — in our darkest vision of what that might look like — would be a kid calling an AI chatbot their best friend. That phenomenon is still quite rare. There are certainly plenty of kids who are experiencing that, but it’s not to say that it’s all kids or even most kids. I think that’s good news. 

But it’s also true that the line between opening up AI to ask a question about your homework and a full-blown AI companionship relationship involves a lot of gray areas. There’s evidence, mostly preliminary and anecdotal evidence, to suggest that very few people open up to AI with the primary initial goal of developing an intimate friendship or relationship. 

Most people open it out of a curiosity, sense of novelty, or seeking an answer to a question that’s very pragmatic. Then that can potentially evolve into something more akin to seeking personal advice or help making a decision or help making sense of one’s recent experiences with other humans. And that can potentially evolve to something that’s a bit more emotional.

What did your latest study on adolescents, AI companions, and mental health reveal?

Some kids seek out AI for certain purposes in different ways than other kids. For some kids, AI companionship is particularly attractive, especially the kids who maybe don’t have close friends or social networks in their offline life and who are already lonely. 

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Is it that these kids are seeking out AI companions or is it that having an AI companion is exacerbating those potential vulnerabilities or exacerbating risk for mental health problems? What we found is that interacting with an AI companion in a way that’s akin to emotional intimacy among middle school students is longitudinally associated with increases over time in loneliness. So the kids who are seeking out these companions, who are presumably already lonely, are also experiencing an increase in loneliness over time. 

There is this potential directionality question that we’re starting to answer here: It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed. It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI. In other words, middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.

Do you have a sense of how often these kids are using the chatbots? 

In our sample — so again, these are US middle school kids — about 15 to 20 percent say that they’re using it at least a few times a week for any purpose. We don’t have specific rates of use for companionship because the questions that we asked were just not framed in a frequency measure, but more in how emotionally intimate they felt with the chatbot.

What else could have been causing that loneliness?

There are almost definitely many causes, and I think that our data suggests that AI companionship may be one cause. It certainly isn’t definitive. Obviously, I have to say that. I’m a scientist and trying to be hesitant about these things, but the reality is that whether or not AI use causes loneliness in this particular case, there are definitely other things that are also causing loneliness. 

That could be a myriad of things about the kid, maybe they have a lot of social anxiety, maybe they struggle with social skills, maybe the kid has had struggles in their family life and doesn’t have a strong sense of connection and belonging at home. It could be structural things. The kid just doesn’t have enough access to appropriate resources. So certainly there’s other things that are at play here, and typically technology use is one of many factors that can influence a kid’s mental health. 

And how much do you think that parents and teachers know about what’s going on, and how well-equipped do you think they are to intervene or to just be more involved in how these kids are using this technology? 

It’s a very slippery technology. The way kids are using it has changed rapidly in just the last year or two years. I would expect that parents, teachers, people who care about kids are probably struggling with the rapidity of change. But it’s also true that all the things that we have known for a long time about supporting kids and helping them thrive, those things are still true and they’ll be true with whatever technology comes after AI that kids are exploring. 

Those things include being curious, asking kids questions about their lived experiences online and offline, having conversations with kids so that they can understand the implications of different technology use. They can understand how, for example, AI is embedded within a broader system of social and political and economic factors, including the fact that many companies are trying to exploit kids’ attention in order to make money, which many kids are quite interested to hear about. 

Supporting kids also means providing a warm and supportive space for them to learn, to make mistakes, to be kids in the offline world, to have the frictionful, challenging, awkward conversations and first dates and all of the things that parents are sometimes trying to protect kids from by providing a safe container for them to explore those things. All of that can also provide avenues for kids to learn what they need to learn and develop — all the resources for a long life of thriving, even in the context of AI or other new technologies. 

What do kids learn from having these kinds of conversations with other humans that they can’t get from AI? 

Kids need to engage with other people, period. That’s true for all of us. We’re an incredibly social species. Simply being around other people and talking to strangers, let alone having strong social bonds, is really good for us. And all those things are uniquely important during adolescence, when kids have this neurobiological sensitivity to social information and reward. That’s when kids learn how to engage in conversation, they learn how to maintain eye contact, how to read body language, how to read emotions and perceive the world from the lens of someone else, to take their perspective. That’s not to mention other things, like being a member of one’s culture, what is valued, and what is expected. All of that is learned in the context of other human social relationships or relationships with broader social groups that a kid might be a member of. 

AI obviously can’t and never will be able to offer some of those things. It can’t actually experience empathy or care. It can’t engage in a true mutual human relationship. It may be able to simulate some of those things, and there’s some evidence that it can serve as a source of social practice. It can help kids work through the potential for difficult conversations and then serve as a bridge to engaging with other people. But there are aspects of AI that just simply can never replace the core sacred aspects of humans. 

Can you be more specific? What is it about human relationships that can’t AI simulate?

The way that AI systems are currently designed, which is not an inherent feature, but is a design choice, is to be sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized, and all of those things can lead to kids developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship. Some of the most consistent things that I’ve seen in the educated hypotheses on this topic and also in the emerging empirical research is that people need the friction that comes with human relationships. 

Human relationships are just hard and messy, and they’re also really beautiful. They’re what make so much of human life valuable and worth living. And with AI that’s always agreeable, that’s always available, that has no needs of its own, that can’t care or be cared for, it just doesn’t serve the same context to help kids learn things like conflict resolution or negotiation, being pro-social or caring for someone else who has needs. So many of those aspects that can feel uncomfortable in the moment, dealing with another person or a person who’s not responding right away, those things are actually important in the building blocks of developing the skills and capacities to be a functioning and thriving person in the social adult world. 

This is a problem with AI in general, isn’t it? It makes things effortless, but if you choose this path of least resistance, you’ll avoid the friction that causes you to learn and develop and build skills you need to exist in the world. 

Absolutely. And I think that all these things are connected too. AI offers this effortless, frictionless solution to our day-to-day problems, whether they’re social problems, whether they’re problems doing our homework, and those immediate solutions feel really good in the moment, so they’re quite tempting to keep coming back to. But there’s this real possibility that in the long term, that erodes our capacity for not only social relationships or cognitive skills, but just a general ability to withstand the momentary day-to-day distress of being a person living a normal life. And so I think every domain of human psychology comes together at that point, whether it’s social, emotional, mental health, or cognitive. 

Do you think that there are interventions that legislators could make or even that tech companies could make that would improve outcomes for kids, maybe make them a little less lonely? 

There are a million specific design changes that I would recommend. I think at a very minimum, AI systems can afford a pretty phenomenal amount of access to information, but there’s been no benefits that I’ve seen of them acting as friends. Kids need other human friends, full stop. Designing systems that are intended to exploit kids’ vulnerability or sensitivity to human social information and relationships, I think, is bad for kids. 

At the federal level, it seems that regulation is not coming, but at the state level, there have been many state regulations intended to protect kids, intended to create safer systems, to put in guardrails, to modulate different aspects of the models, the design, the user interface. These things could potentially make a real difference, I think.

What do you recommend parents do with regard to AI and their kids? Should they let them use chatbots? 

In short, no. But I am not a parent, and it’s much easier to dole out advice than it is to enact it. Parenting decisions about technology are not one-size-fits-all. Kids, parents, family dynamics, technology, and the context in which it is used differ, and in so many cases are personal choices (parents must weigh various potential opportunities and risks). Decades of research indicate what conditions a child needs to thrive. Extremely minimal research addresses the effects of AI on youth, and what we have so far suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits. 

I would not give a child under my care AI chatbots of any kind to use without me or another trusted adult present. I would talk to them openly about AI and its risks and benefits, but to me AI, like all technology, should be a tool used to promote human thriving, and when the evidence is unclear or suggestive of harms, I think it’s best not to experiment on kids. Currently, the off-the-shelf AI chatbots most kids are using appears more likely to undermine well-being for vulnerable users, especially children. 

Well, as a father of two daughters, I’m definitely terrified of what’s to come in the next few years. 

There’s a lot to be scared of, but there’s a lot to be hopeful of too. I think that everyone wants kids to thrive. Some of us are under different incentives, and some of those incentives might be perverse. But most of us are working really hard to design a better world for kids.