‘Young people have always felt misunderstood by their parents, but new research shows that Gen Alpha might also be misunderstood by AI. A research paper, written by Manisha Mehta, a soon-to-be 9th grader, and presented today at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Athens, shows that Gen Alpha’s distinct mix of meme- and gaming-influenced language might be challenging automated moderation used by popular large language models. …’ _Rosie Thomas via 404 Media

It seems to me that youth used to lament the fact that their parents didn’t understand them but it now may be celebrated and cultivated. Language has always served not just to convey meaning, but also to signal group identity and belonging. One of the psychological tasks of the maturation process is individuation and separation, and social media has made it so much easier for language to be an important tool in that process. So it’s understandable that Gen Alpha uses expressions that feel natural to them, even if — or because — older generations don’t understand them. But what happens when the pace of change leaves even members of the same group struggling to keep up? We often talk about how social media is eroding attention spans—but could it also be undermining the sophisticated communication abilities we evolved over millennia? If conveying meaning depends on transient and rapidly changing cultural associations, it may fragment the abilities of even members of a generation or social stratum to understand one another, further eroding our march away from community.