Meeting GenAI Challenges with Míchílín Ní Threasaigh part 1

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a mother who was telling me about her son who was playing Grand Theft Auto and he was playing it a lot.

And she said, I just don't understand.

She said, he is such a nice person.

He's lovely and he's wonderful.

And yet he is compelled by Grand Theft Auto.

And she said, I approached him.

I said, look, this is complete mystery to me.

I cannot understand it.

You're such a nice person.

You've never misbehaved in any way similar to this.

What's going on? He said, this is a virtual space.

I can be bad without penalty.

And so I'm trying out a different value system.

I'm trying out a different lifestyle.

And it's a place where I can indulge that safely.

And so that's why I think this is a really interesting thing for us to try to imagine as an inquiry among female students.

It's true.

You're reminding me of that earlier.

It wasn't so much of a debate as an earlier pearl clutching moment around violent video games.

Remember all that? And we even had studies showing that, you know, these were in fact bad for kids.

And then what we found was that as those kids who were engaging in, you know, the first person shooter games, et cetera, that we found so reprehensible as grownups were, As they grew up and became researchers and studied the topic themselves, we had different results, right? And a lot of the findings were that, yes, this was sort of a safe space to vent or a safe way to release tension or aggression or whatever in a socially acceptable way, as it was at the time.

It is now.

Well, one of the things that you and I know about adolescents is that they are becoming, and they are extremely curious about being adults.

and the various pressures and choices responsibilities and freedoms and this is just completely compelling to them we know this from tv and from the movies that they consume and so here's a situation where they can put themselves into a simulation and actually practice and learn and test out various hypotheses to see where they go and what they do and i would be really pleased if I learned at some point that these kinds of self-education, which is what we're describing here, might end up saving them from a toxic relationship at a future point.

This notion of toxicity though is something that has been really glommed onto by mainstream news reports.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a mother who was telling me about her son who was playing Grand Theft Auto and he was playing it a lot.

And she said, I just don't understand.

She said, he is such a nice person.

He's lovely and he's wonderful.

And yet he is compelled by Grand Theft Auto.

And she said, I approached him.

I said, look, this is complete mystery to me.

I cannot understand it.

You're such a nice person.

You've never misbehaved in any way similar to this.

What's going on? He said, this is a virtual space.

I can be bad without penalty.

And so I'm trying out a different value system.

I'm trying out a different lifestyle.

And it's a place where I can indulge that safely.

And so that's why I think this is a really interesting thing for us to try to imagine as an inquiry among female students.

It's true.

You're reminding me of that earlier.

It wasn't so much of a debate as an earlier pearl clutching moment around violent video games.

Remember all that? And we even had studies showing that, you know, these were in fact bad for kids.

And then what we found was that as those kids who were engaging in, you know, the first person shooter games, et cetera, that we found so reprehensible as grownups were, As they grew up and became researchers and studied the topic themselves, we had different results, right? And a lot of the findings were that, yes, this was sort of a safe space to vent or a safe way to release tension or aggression or whatever in a socially acceptable way, as it was at the time.

It is now.

Well, one of the things that you and I know about adolescents is that they are becoming, and they are extremely curious about being adults.

and the various pressures and choices responsibilities and freedoms and this is just completely compelling to them we know this from tv and from the movies that they consume and so here's a situation where they can put themselves into a simulation and actually practice and learn and test out various hypotheses to see where they go and what they do and i would be really pleased if I learned at some point that these kinds of self-education, which is what we're describing here, might end up saving them from a toxic relationship at a future point.

This notion of toxicity though is something that has been really glommed onto by mainstream news reports.