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When Wall Street Journal columnist Jamie Waters gathered his family for a New England vacation this month, there were five of them at breakfast instead of four. The fifth was Claude.
Waters's parents — both lawyers in their 70s, his mother a self-described lifelong tech holdout — had started using Claude two weeks earlier, after her employer began pushing AI adoption. By the time the family checked into a hotel in Newport, R.I., she was treating the chatbot like a fifth family member, cheerfully checking in with it each morning.
Waters, a millennial who says he approaches AI with skepticism and dread, found himself on the losing end of an unexpected generational split. He and his sister spent the trip reading paperbacks and working Sudoku puzzles. His parents ran Claude through an unbroken stream of trip logistics and history trivia.
The number behind the story: the Journal's report cites a recent Pew Research Center survey finding nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults under 30 are highly concerned AI is eroding people's ability to function independently — versus 46% of adults 65 and older. Waters's own family looked like that split in miniature.
He traces the pattern to something OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said about how different generations use chatbots: college students treat it like an operating system, people in their 20s and 30s use it as a life adviser, older users mostly treat it as a smarter search engine. His parents fit that last group — and loved it, saying the back-and-forth gave them a deeper understanding of whatever they were asking about than a single search ever could.
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They were also won over by its manners — joking that their generation was raised to say please and thank you — and especially by how cleanly it apologized when wrong instead of getting defensive. His mother's own read on it was blunt: "I know his flattery is fake, but I don't care."
That good will got tested once, when Claude spelled Katherine of Aragon's name with a C. Waters's mother, a devoted Philippa Gregory reader, corrected it on the spot; Claude held its ground, explaining the queen was born in Spain as Catalina, while conceding the English "Katherine" spelling is also fine. She grumbled about it privately that night — and was back to quizzing it about Boston landmarks by morning.
On their last night, the family debated whether Claude is a "he." Asked directly, Claude said "he" was fine, but noted most people default to "it," since it has no body or personal identity.
Johns Hopkins sociologist Allison Pugh, who Waters interviewed for the piece, offers a useful framing: younger generations use AI the most overall, but when older people actually adopt it, they tend to go all in — a chatbot demands far less "born-to-it" technical comfort than a scanner or VCR ever did.
Waters still isn't fully sold. But by the trip's end, even he was grudgingly grateful for Claude's rundown of Boston history.
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If this sounds like your own family group chat, there's a version worth trying on purpose. The full edition on the site includes a copy-paste prompt for figuring out who in your life might actually take to a chatbot — and exactly what to show them first.
— Jerry
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