In 1976, South Africa’s youth took to the streets to claim educational agency and the hard-won right to self-determination. Fifty years later, our young digital natives face a quieter, subtler crisis: the gradual surrender of that very critical reasoning and agency to artificial intelligence.
The youth’s growing digital comfort is in many ways a shield against persistent unemployment, but we must not over-generalize and mistake screen-deep fluency for actual digital resilience – it blinds us to the profound cognitive, societal, and commercial risks of AI-dependence and growing cognitive outsourcing.
According to a Pew Research Centre survey of 1 458 teenagers aged 13–17, 64% have used AI chatbots, and nearly 30% use them daily. Of those daily users, more than half talk to chatbots constantly throughout the day. This scale of engagement shows that interacting with these algorithmic entities has transitioned from being a novelty into a deeply ingrained habit.
The thing is, there is a wide chasm between functional digital literacy and critical literacy. Knowing how to write a prompt for a generative AI is not the same as understanding how responses to that prompt can be manipulated, hallucinated, or poisoned.
