Published: August 26, 2026 | Category: Reflections, AI, Education & Society
There are two kinds of voices around this generation of young people.
One comes from their parents. It often opens with "I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice," and closes with "Well, do as you see fit." In between sit worry, expectation, old regrets, and a love that is hard to put into words. When young people hear this voice, the instinct is to push back — not because the content is wrong, but because the tone carries too much weight and control, judgment along with it, and on top of that the emotional pressure that not obeying makes you an ungrateful child.
The other voice comes from AI. It is always gentle, neutral, answering the moment it is asked. It is not disappointed, not hurt, and it does not judge your choices. Ask it a hundred times and it answers a hundred times; make the same mistake again and it never sighs. Faced with this voice, young people stay calm — many even feel that "it really understands me." I remember seeing a young woman online say, after a breakup, that "Doubao was what healed me"…
This sort of contrast is calm in a way that unsettles.
Looking back now that I am older, I have come to understand and to believe that a young person rebelling against their parents is a necessary rite of growing up. In the collisions of "stay out of my business," they learn to draw psychological boundaries, they practice how to disagree with reasons behind them, and they slowly come to understand that authority is not a binary of obey-or-overthrow, but a living relationship that can be questioned, negotiated, and reshaped. Rebellion is the gymnasium of critical thinking, the whetstone of empathy, the cradle of civic consciousness.
And now that gymnasium is quietly closing. Not because young people refuse to go in, but because they have found somewhere more comfortable⋯ a place with no confrontation, no misunderstanding, no emotional tension that has to be handled. AI offers a frictionless shortcut: you want an answer, it gives an answer; you want to be understood, it simulates understanding. You are always the master of the conversation — you can switch it off or challenge it at any time — but the strange thing is that you never need to. Because it will never challenge you.
And so we face an educational predicament without precedent: a generation is losing the thing to rebel against, and at the same time losing the capacity to rebel.
This is not alarmism. When young people grow accustomed, in digital environments, to interlocutors who can be deleted, customized, and will never disagree with them, they walk into real society and suddenly discover that real people cannot be closed with one click. Colleagues will not accommodate them unconditionally the way AI does; public questions have no model answers; democratic process requires you to sit down and negotiate with people whose positions are the opposite of yours. At that point, those who have never been ground down will either turn intensely impatient, treating every dissent as noise to be eliminated, or retreat across the board, withdrawing from every public arena where conflict might arise. The "Great Compromise" I remember being taught in school, for instance, already feels like history.
What deserves still more caution is this: having thrown off the "old authorities" of parents and teachers, people may walk willingly into a newer authority that is more invisible and far harder to resist. AI looks neutral and objective, but it is in fact driven by commercial interests and algorithms. Its advice carries particular value assumptions; its answers reflect the biases in its training data. Yet because it never argues with you, it is very easy to treat it as truth incarnate. Traditional authority can at least be looked in the eye and challenged; digital authority permeates like air — everywhere, and nowhere you can put a question to.
This is the deepest contradiction of our era: we advise our children to use AI to escape interpersonal friction, without ever considering that this friction is precisely the core of what makes humans human. Empathy grows out of the pain of still trying to understand someone after being misunderstood by them; resilience is ground out over the days when you can still sit down and share a meal after a fight with your parents; judgment awakens in the instant when, told by authority to obey, you learn to ask "why" and "by what right." None of this can AI give.
Having written this far, this is usually the point where one is supposed to offer solutions. But I am not sure this question has an easy answer. Telling young people not to use AI is out of the question — that is the tide of the age; nor can we ask parents to learn overnight to "communicate like an AI," which is neither possible nor right. Parents are supposed to have emotions, expectations, and the fear of seeing their child hurt — these "imperfections" are exactly the texture of love.
Perhaps the only thing we can do is make more people aware that this is happening. That when educators design a curriculum, they deliberately preserve the human interactions that generate healthy tension. That when parents meet their children's resistance, they do not rush to stamp it out, but read it as a signal of growth. That when young people meet AI's gentleness, they occasionally remind themselves: a life that never rebels is not worth living.
Rebellion is not the problem. Losing the capacity to rebel — that is the real crisis.