The following is excerpted from an online article posted by Yahoo
A recent Wired story reported that parents are hearing their kids use “that’s AI” as shorthand for “that’s BS.” Writer Joan Westenberg wrote a widely shared Threads post saying that her 9-year-old and classmates use “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.” Commenters said, “Same.”
For Gen Alpha, AI already seems to be more than the name of a technology. It’s shorthand for something that feels fake, copied or simply unbelievable.
What’s happening has a name: semantic broadening.
“The meaning of many words gets broader over time,” Ryan L. Boyd, a psychologist and computational social scientist at Vanderbilt University’s College of Connected Computing, tells Yahoo. “Specific terms turn into general ones, and it happens constantly.”
We’ve seen it before with the technologies associated with whatever counted as “fake” at the time, he says. Think: “canned,” “cookie-cutter,” “plastic,” “Photoshopped.”
Kids aren’t necessarily confusing knockoffs with AI-generated content. They’re describing the feeling it gives them. Both look convincing enough, but something doesn’t feel quite right.
Humans instinctively look for the person behind a creation, Boyd explains. But kids are increasingly encountering things in which no person was directly involved in the creative process. So they’ve developed what amounts to a “BS detector” for things that feel inauthentic.
What also stands out is that kids don’t use “that’s AI” as a neutral term — it’s an insult.
“There’s an assumption floating around that kids raised alongside AI will be easy marks for it, and I don’t see much of that in how they talk,” Boyd says. (Another example: “Clanker,” the derogatory term aimed at AI and robots.)
Rather than seeing AI as futuristic or cool, many kids associate it with low quality or, using the internet’s new favorite term, slop.