Sam Altman is worried about one kind of tech messing with kids' brains — and it's not AI

Business Insider

24-07-2025

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is worried the kids won't be alright.
Altman was speaking to podcaster Theo Von in an interview that aired Wednesday when he was asked how parents could prepare their children for the AI age.
Altman said what really worried him was the psychological impact addictive social media platforms could have on children.
"I do have worries about kids in technology. I think this short video feed dopamine hit, it feels like it's probably messing with kids' brain development in a super deep way," he said.
Representatives for Altman did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Altman said in his interview with Von that when it comes to AI, he was more concerned about how the older generation would adapt to it.
The younger generation, meanwhile, "will be fine," Altman said.
"If you look at the history of the world here, when there's new technology, people that grow up with it, they're always fluent. They always figure out what to do. They always learn the new kind of jobs," Altman said.
"But if you're a 50-year-old and you have to learn to do things in a very different way, that doesn't always work," he added.
But that's not to say that AI won't have an impact on youths.
On Tuesday, Altman said at a Federal Reserve banking event that young people were over-relying on ChatGPT for decision-making.
"Even if ChatGPT gives way better advice than any human therapist, something about collectively deciding we're going to live our lives the way AI tells us feels bad and dangerous," Altman said.
Altman isn't the only one who has talked about the dangers posed by social media platforms to children.
Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, told BI in January that social media apps were "severely damaging children in the Western world." Haidt is best known for his book "The Anxious Generation" where he argued that social media and smartphones were affecting the attention spans of young people.
"The decimation of human attention around the world might even be a bigger cost to humanity than the mental health and mental illness epidemic," Haidt said.