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If a Gen Alpha tween said, Let him cook, would you know what that meant? No? AI doesnt either. A research paper written by soon-to-be ninth grader Manisha Mehta was presented this week at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Athens. The paper details how four leading AI modelsGPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama 3all struggled to fully understand slang from Gen Alpha, defined as those born between 2010 and 2024. Mehta, along with 24 of her friends (ranging in age from 11 to 14), created a dataset of 100 Gen Alpha phrases. These included expressions that can mean totally different things depending on contextfor example: “Fr fr let him cook” (encouraging) and “Let him cook lmaoo (mocking). According to the researchers, the LLMs had trouble discerning the difference. In particular, AI struggled with identifying “masked harassment,” which is concerning given the increasing reliance on AI-powered content moderation systems. “The findings highlight an urgent need for improved AI safety systems to better protect young users, especially given Gen Alphas tendency to avoid seeking help due to perceived adult incomprehension of their digital world,” the study reads. It wasnt just the AI models that performed poorly; parents didnt do much better. The parent group scored 68% in basic understanding of Gen Alpha slang, nearly identical to the top-performing LLM, Claude (68.1%). While the LLMs did slightly better at identifying content and safety risks in the language, only Gen Alpha members themselves scored highly in understanding the slang, its context, and potential risks. Its nothing new for young people to feel misunderstood by their parents, but now the gap is widening. Members of Gen Alpha, born post-iPhone and known as the iPad generation, have grown up online. Their native language, often sourced from online spaces (most notably gaming), evolves so quickly that whats popular today may disappear within a month. Mehtas research shows that parentsand even professional moderatorsare likely to miss context shifts in comment sections. For example: OMGG you ate that up fr, versus You ate that up ig [skull]. The implications of the study suggest that parents might recognize only a third of the times their child is being bullied in comments, even if theyre closely monitoring their online activity. Simply put, the systems meant to keep kids safe online dont speak their language.
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Community members whose local Kroger stores are on the chopping block are urging the company to reconsider. Residents in cities impacted by the grocery chain’s recent announcement of store closures, including in Abingdon, Virginia; Kingsport, Tennessee; Gassaway, West Virginia; and Charlottesville, Virginia, have started petitions in hopes of convincing the company to reverse course and keep the stores open. In its Q1 earnings call last week, the grocery retailer announced that it would be closing 60 stores in the next 18 months. Kroger Co (NYSE: KR) expects a modest financial benefit from this decision, but community members losing their stores are concerned about these closures impact on employee livelihoods and food access. Krogers, if you leave you are creating a huge hole in our community, one signatory commented on a petition with over 1,500 signatures. We shop with you specifically and have supported you for decades. Please dont abandon us. Other signatories cite their positive experiences with store employees as a reason to want the stores to remain open. Kroger has stated in its earnings call that affected employees would be offered jobs at other locations. When contacted by Fast Company, a spokesperson declined to comment more specifically on the fates of employees or on the petitions from community members. Food workers’ union involvement Many of these petitions have been started or are supported by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400 Union, a local union chapter that represents Kroger workers in six states and Washington, D.C. Four stores whose employees are represented by the union are planned to close later this year. Through these petitions, the union hopes to show the company that union members and affected communities are united in opposing the closures. “Lets be clear: Kroger is abandoning our communities just so their Wall Street investors can make an extra buck, UFCW Local 400 wrote in a statement to Fast Company. We think our jobs and our access to fresh food are worth more than that and we shouldnt be paying the price for Krogers decisions. In some areas, the union notes, the local Kroger store is the only traditional grocery store left. The problem with food deserts The USDA estimates that 18.8 million people6.1% of the U.S. populationlive in low-income areas more than one mile from a grocery store, or in low-access tracts more than 10 miles from a grocery store. Studies have linked limited access to fresh and nutritious food to negative health outcomes, such as diabetes, cardiovascular issues, and obesity. Kroger has not provided a full list of the 60 stores that will close. However, many of the doomed locations have been revealed by local media reports. “We urge Kroger to reverse course and continue to operate these much-needed stores for the benefit of our members and the customers who depend on them, wrote UFCW Local 700. Krogers stock price jumped from $69.43 to $72.00 between the start of its Friday Q1 earnings call and start of trade the following Monday but has since been slightly trending down.
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E-Commerce
Five years ago, I bought an e-bike. At the time, the motor-equipped two-wheelers were burdened with an iffy reputation. Was it way easier to get up a hill on one than on a bike without a battery? Absolutely. Did that mean people who rode them were lazy or even cheaters? Some cycling enthusiasts thought so. But what if the boost provided by your e-bike motivated you to make longer trips and more of themall powered, in part, by your own pedaling? Having logged almost 10,000 miles on my Gazelle, Im certain its been a guilt-free boon to my well-being. Data backs me up. I thought about that recently while reading about a new study conducted at MITs Media Lab. Researchers divided subjects ages 18 to 39 into three groups and had them write essays on topics drawn from the SAT questions answered by college applicants, such as Do works of art have the power to change people’s lives? One group relied entirely on unassisted brainpower to complete the essay. A second group could use a search engine. And the third could call on ChatGPT. The study subjects wore EEG helmets that captured their brain activity as they worked. After analyzing that data, the researchers concluded that access to ChatGPT didnt just make composing an essay easier. It made it too easy, in ways that might negatively impact peoples long-term ability to think for themselves. In some cases, the ChatGPT users merely cut and pasted text the chatbot had generated; not surprisingly, they exhibited little sense of ownership over the finished product compared to those who didnt have a computerized ghost on tap. Due to the instant availability of the response to almost any question, LLMs can possibly make a learning process feel effortless, and prevent users from attempting any independent problem solving, the researchers wrote in their report. By simplifying the process of obtaining answers, LLMs could decrease student motivation to perform independent research and generate solutions. Lack of mental stimulation could lead to a decrease in cognitive development and negatively impact memory. The study reached those sobering conclusions in the context of young people growing up in an era of bountiful access to AI. But the alarms it set off also left me worried about the technologys impact on my own brain. I have long considered AI an e-bike for my mindsomething that speeds it through certain tasks, thereby letting it go places previously out of reach. What if its actually so detrimental to my mental acuity that I havent even noticed my critical faculties withering away? After pondering that worst-case scenario for a while, I calmed down. Yes, consistently opting for the most expedient way to accomplish work rather than the one that produces the best results is no way to live. Sure, being overly reliant on ChatGPTor any form of generative AIhas its hazards. But Im pretty confident its possible to embrace AI without your reasoning skills atrophying. No single task can represent all the ways people engage with AI, and the one the MIT researchers choseessay writingis particularly fraught. The best essays reflect the unique insight of a particular person: When students take the actual SAT for real, they arent even allowed to bring a highlighter, let alone a bot. We dont need EGG helmets to tell us that people who paste ChatGPTs work into an essay theyve nominally written have lost out on the learning opportunity presented by grappling with a topic, reaching conclusions, and expressing them for oneself. However, ChatGPT and its LLM brethren also excel at plenty of jobs too mundane to feel guilty about outsourcing. Each week, for example, I ask Anthropics Claude to clean up some of the HTML required to produce this newsletter. It handles this scut work faster and more accurately than I can. Im not sure what my brain waves would reveal, but Im happy to reinvest any time not spent on production drudgery into more rewarding aspects of my job. Much of the time, AI is most useful not as a solution but a starting point. Almost never would I ask a chatbot about factual information, get an answer, and call it a day. Theyre still too error-prone for that. Yet their ease of use makes them an inviting way to get rolling on projects. I think of them as facilitating the research before the old-school research I usually end up doing. And sometimes, AI is a portal into adventures I might otherwise never have taken. So far in 2025, my biggest rabbit hole has been vibe codingcoming up with ideas for apps and then having an LLM craft the necessary software using programming tools I dont even understand. Being exposed to technologies such as React and TypeScript has left me wanting to learn enough about them to do serious coding on my own. If I do, AI can take credit for sparking that ambition. Im only so Pollyanna-ish about all this. Over time, the people who see AI as an opportunity to do more thinkingnot less of itcould be a lonely minority. If so, the MIT researchers can say We told you so. Case in point: At the same time the MIT study was in the news, word broke that VC titan Andreessen Horowitz had invested $15 million in Cluely, a truly dystopian startup whose manifesto boasts its aim of helping people use AI to cheat at everything based on the theory that the future wont reward effort. Its origin story involves cofounder and CEO Roy Lee being suspended from Columbia University after developing an app for cheating on technical employment interviews. Which makes me wonder how Lee would feel about his own candidates misleading their way into job offers. With any luck, the future will turn out to punish Cluelys cynicism. But the companys existenceand investors willingness to shower it with moneysays worse things about humankind than about AI. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky
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