What Gen Z wants from AI policymakers | Semafor
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Gen Z Voices on AI Guardrails
Sneha Revanur has become one of the leading Gen Z voices calling for AI guardrails, a push that has taken her to the White House, state legislatures, and the cover of Time magazine. She is the founder and president of Encode Justice, a group she established when she was 15 to mobilize high school and college students to ensure AI is aligned with human values. The organization, funded by groups connected to billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and others, recently called on global policymakers to pass rules protecting the livelihoods and rights of young people as the technology is developed by 2030.
We talked with Revanur, 19, and Adam Billen, 22, director of policy who attends American University, about Encode’s ambitious AI 2030 agenda. The manifesto outlines Encode’s policy goals as it works alongside governments and companies to develop the technology in a way that benefits young people.
Top AI Concerns for Young People
Billen: The most present thing for people that feels very direct is deepfakes and disinformation online. Anyone that’s actively using social media is encountering that now. Young people are also thinking more broadly about these tools in the workplace and in schools, and some of the larger risks in the future like autonomous weapons. People are very concerned about their career paths going into the future, and whether what they’re studying now will even be relevant in 10 or 15 years.
Revanur: For a young person navigating the digital world, there’s a whole host of things you have to worry about that previous generations didn’t have to. We have seen young people turning to chatbots when they should be turning to friends and family, or mental health professionals. That’s obviously very concerning, because sometimes these chatbots aren’t equipped to navigate mental health emergencies. I really worry that that will impact the fabric of our society, and that will lead to a collapse of the bonds that really sustain us.
Social Media Manipulation and AI
Billen: People are starting to recognize that the basic algorithms on these platforms are at the crux of a lot of what is driving their sort of toxic patterns of attention and associations with themselves and their friends. It’s driving eating disorders, CSAM [child sexual abuse material], all of these issues are being driven partially just because the fundamental profit mechanism of these companies is to push whatever gets clicks, and will keep people on the platform.
Revanur: I would say that it’s really important to shift the blame from individual users to these larger companies that could honestly make very minute design choices that wouldn’t really impact their bottom line all too much, but would have a dramatic impact on user experience.
Pushing for Opt-Out Choices
Revanur: They’re not, and we’re asking for them to let us opt out in our AI 2030 agenda.
Billen: Yeah, absolutely. Two key examples of this would be Snapchat. Its AI bot is glued to your home screen and is the top thing whenever you open the app, and there’s no way to easily opt out of that. And just on Instagram, we’ve seen now that the Meta AI search is extraordinarily annoying. Sometimes you search for things and it pops up with the Llama chatbot screen instead of just going and searching what you actually want to search.
Making AI Policies Actionable
Revanur: We have presented the agenda as an itemized list of things we want more leaders to enact by 2030 but it’s also, in many ways, a to-do list for us by 2030 and what we’re going to be pushing for in the US and internationally. We hope to continue working with legislators at the state level, at the federal level, and at the international level to get these things passed.
Future of AI and Human Values
Billen: If you’re interacting with a chatbot, you should know that you’re interacting with a chatbot, for example, with a customer service representative. We don’t want to live in a world where you’re talking to someone on the phone and you have no idea whether you’re talking to a human or a machine. It’s going to take real work to make these machines actually reflect human values based on the current technology. We don’t want to see one where they’re entirely built on the predicate of appeasing us, especially with the interaction of chatbots with young people or in romantic relationships.
Revanur: We want a world where we can see trust and community and connection and creativity and critical thinking not just preserved, but also revitalized. That is a future that is possible with AI, but it’s not the future that we’re headed towards right now. Those are all the core values that make human society resilient and so strong, and that’s what I want to keep fighting for.
