What ‘AI slop’ is really doing to distrusting Gen Alpha kids

I’m arguing about football with my six-year-old grandson, a Chelsea fan. I’m trying to convert him to a proper team – Nottingham Forest.

I show him black-and-white footage of my team’s glory days, winning two European Cups in the 1980s.

Ten seconds in, he sneers, saying, “fake”, and turns away. I tried to explain that it’s completely reliable because I remember seeing it live, but he wouldn’t have it.

Initially, I admired this six-year-old scepticism, but shortly afterwards, it struck me as rather chilling.

If children barely out of nappies are cynical enough to dismiss anything unexpected as AI rubbish, we really do have a problem with the so-called Generation Alpha – digital natives born from 2010 onwards.

There’s a Yorkshire phrase: “Them as believes nowt’ll believe owt” – meaning, “Those who believe nothing will believe anything”. In everyday terms, people who dismiss everything as unbelievable are, ironically, the most gullible when confronted with something truly extraordinary.

This old folk sentiment was restated in 1908 by the left-wing Catholic thinker GK Chesterton, who observed, “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything”.

He wasn’t saying scepticism is foolish. Rather, he argued that rejecting the mainstream doesn’t necessarily make you more intellectually rigorous. Instead, it can leave you more vulnerable to fashionable ideas, mystical nonsense, political or ideological fads, or pseudoscience and superstition.

I was about eight when I first became dimly aware of this paradox: simple people often assume everything they hear from cleverer people is a hoax, believing it’s they who are being clever by rejecting it. Today, it’s exactly what gives conspiracy theories their power among the Farage/Trump/QAnon/Alex Jones demographic.

Back then, it was just an encounter with a rather thick boy at school while we were both having a breaktime wee, but it’s stayed with me. For some reason, I had mentioned that there are 24 hours in a day.

“But what about night?” the boy said.

I explained that a day includes both daytime and nighttime.

He frowned at me. “You're tricking me,” he said, and ran off.

Leaving aside that the boy became a Tory councillor some years later, this illustrates exactly the weakness Donald Trump understands – a stroke of evil genius, in my view. Tell naïve people that real news is fake, and it’s no stretch to convince them that fake news is real.

The internet warped the notion of truth long before the AI boom, but now, thanks to AI, things are far more serious. The problem isn’t everyday reliance on AI – it’s the dismissal of anything unfamiliar as an AI fake.

When small children start doubting everything from reliable sources, and every video on TikTok seems suspect, it may look like early sophistication. But it’s not a long hop from there to witch-burning.

It’s awkward. We do need children to be sceptical – just not too sceptical, and not blindly so.

It should be possible to teach critical thinking: how to differentiate good sources from bad. But the fear is that the dimmer ones will then be convinced by online bad actors that what they are taught is deliberately misleading. It’s a rabbit hole.

Two things might help in the years to come. One is that AI might become more self-critical, warning users to check alternative sources, even alternative AI agents. AI has no ego and is not “ashamed” to admit it’s wrong – it’s still a glorified adding machine, like any computer.

Another possible way out is human nature. Every generation rebels against the last, and recent studies show that Gen Alpha is tending to rely more on family and friends than on internet trends or recommendations from dodgy, often corrupt – or fake – “influencers”. They also prefer real-life experiences to living online.

If tomorrow’s teenagers regard today’s screen and phone fixation as laughably 2020, we may yet have a slightly saner, healthier future – one in which young people can distinguish real hoaxes from the current near-paranoid fear of fakes designed to make you look a fool.