Name: A teen on how AI is reshaping his job prospects | Terms of Service
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T17:08:26.000Z
Duration: 12 min 13 s
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It's starting to get to the point where I'm a little bit concerned about understanding what like, is AI and what's not.

Future simple

So when I'm scrolling through my feed, I occasionally will see things that I'm like, I'm not sure which one that is.

To-infinitive

And so up until this point, I've been able to tell really, really well.

But honestly, in the past week, like, even there's been a couple videos that have come up that I've been very, like, I don't know.

On this show, we've talked a lot about how AI impacts teenagers, their schoolwork, their social development.

But what about their futures when it comes to college and career planning?

How are they thinking about how AI factors into that?

I spoke with three current high school students who all had somewhat different philosophies on this, and you can hear all of those conversations in the audio version of this podcast.

Here's my conversation with one of them, Lincoln Bonk, who is a high school.

So I'm a sophomore in high school in Georgia.

Like, what was the tool or the platform that introduced you to AI in the school setting?

So I was in honors biology last year at the beginning of my semester, so it's been about exactly a year when the teacher basically had us do an assignment and he encouraged, I believe it was AI to do research.

I believe I used ChatGPT as my language model for prompting and asking questions.

And then we may have also used image generation, but that may have been later in the class.

And have you been using AI like, in your personal life outside of school at all?

Yeah, so my AI experience did not come from school at all.

And I feel like that's pretty standard with a lot of kids is they get their AI experience somewhere that's not the classroom.

And so when teachers encourage AI use in the classroom, they're not really teaching us.

It's more we're seeing it from our friends or through social media.

And so we have a lot of background knowledge to walk into class with to use it effectively.

So I use AI to better understand, like, different.

Like, I've used it for religious questions before to understand different denominations of my faith.

I've searched for answers for things, used it for research projects, written things, and had it annotate my writing before.

So I've used it for a lot of different Things and mostly ChatGPT or using other platforms too.

ChatGPT is my preferred platform, so I use AI on my mobile platform.

It's like what I typically interact with AI on, but I have tried Copilot, but I really like the fact that ChatGPT has a lot of my chat history and so it knows it can reference conversations.

And I really appreciate the fact that it can do that.

Just going back to school, do you find that most teachers are embracing AI in the classroom?

Has there been resistance to AI at school?

So different classrooms and teachers have different policies and opinions on AI.

So for example, in a lot of my STEM courses, like math, AI is not involved in the classroom very much at all.

That being said, students might use it on their own time to better understand their classwork.

Or we actually did a character AI chat in class to better understand a play we were reading.

And depending on the classroom setting we're in, AI is either encouraged or not.

I'm curious both for your opinion and what you've heard from your peers.

How are young people feeling about the influence that AI has in their lives right now?

Are you feeling mostly positive or negative or.

So personally, I felt really positive up until about this point.

I've just seen a lot of, like, the really cool things it can do with, like, content creation.

You know, as a young person on social media, I get to see, like, creators using that to make their videos better.

But as of more recent, I've seen some of the negative impacts.

It's starting to get to the point where I'm a little bit concerned about understanding what like is AI and what's not.

But honestly, in the past week, like, even there's been a couple of videos that have come up that I've been very like, I don't know.

And so that's kind of scaring me and Then also the social impact of, like, if someone were to take like my face or a picture of me and edit it using AI.

There's like a way to use AI to like, create like an image of two people kissing each other.

And that's just like, really concerning because that impacts my daily life and social life.

If that were to, like, if people don't mess around too much with that, like, I haven't, I haven't heard of people using it in quite that way.

So that is both interesting and concerning.

You talked about wanting to go into politics.

Has your thoughts about your future career planning or college changed at all because of AI and the way that we're seeing AI kind of disrupt the workforce at this point?

Personally, it hasn't changed what I've wanted to do.

I'm pretty passionate about wanting to go into politics or business or law.

And so those are like all fields I'm super, super interested in.

But I understand that, like, the approach I might take to get into that or be successful in that has changed to having to be like, tech savvy.

So, for example, I know that I go into politics, I'm going to have to have like a general knowledge of how to use AI, make my work quicker and more efficient.

And I think that's like, really important when looking at like, competitiveness.

If you want to be competitive in a space, you have to be on top of AI.

And I think that's only getting more and more true.

Like, what's your ultimate hope at this point?

Yeah, I'd love to be a politician and then have a business on the side that I run, but honestly, my hands are open.

I do have a lot of time, so politics would be my dream.

And it's kind of cool that, like, you get to see a lot of AI policy creation.

Like, I do a thing in Georgia, it's called Youth assembly, where you will write a bill and then actually present it, like a mock bill to a group of other high schoolers.

And so I've had AI actually help me edit those bills and, you know, funding proposals, just stuff like that.

So I'm seeing AI, like what it might look like in my future career, even as it changes.

We need more politicians who understand AI at this point.

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A teen on how AI is reshaping his job prospects | Terms of Service

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