To find out what that actually looks like day-to-day, we surveyed more than a thousand 9- to 17-year-olds across the country. We asked them how they use AI, how often, and for what.
TheCommon Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens (2026) is the first in a series we’ll repeat every year to learn how this generation’s relationship with AI evolves over time.
A few things stood out:
Kids are using AI for many things. It’s not just a homework helper anymore. For some kids, AI has become a confidant, even though our research is clear that AI companionship is not safe for anyone under 18.
Guardrails are thin to nonexistent. Schools are talking about rules more than safety. Three-quarters of kids say their school has discussed what they can and cannot use AI for, but just over half have been taught how to use AI safely.
Just like we saw with smartphones and social media, the conversation is once again lagging behind the technology. Nearly half of kids have never had a conversation with their parents about AI safety.
From DSC: I used to work with Calvin film and media professor Geert Heetebrij — who was behind this endeavor. I went to the same church that he and his family attended. I can’t say enough good things about him. He’s just fantastic! By the way, he was there for me when twelve of us didn’t survive the fourth round of layoffs at Calvin (back then it was Calvin College). He periodically — but consistently — checked in on me as the job search continued. He prayed for me (and for my family). His steadfast encouragement meant a lot to me.
I also worked with Sam Smartt, who was also mentioned in the article.Go Geert! Go Sam! And go Calvin for continuing to do your prison ministries! You were one of the first to do this, if not thee first.
The landscape for specialized colleges and universities such as art schools is shifting as higher education continues to evolve to fit emerging job markets and student interest.
Founded in 1882, Cleveland Institute of Art continuously challenges itself to stay modern and relevant. Years ago, the school’s leadership had the vision to partner with the city to revitalize an area due for reinvigoration.
The result was the Interactive Media Lab, which brings together the university, the city and private industry into a satellite campus that gives students and the community a space to create media, art and experiences with the most up-to-date tools available.
But at a moment defined by rapid AI adoption and ongoing debates about screen time, the argument for protecting and investing in arts education needs to take on a new tone. The arts continue to be one of the most effective places in school for students to build healthier, more intentional relationships with technology.
In short, in the age of AI, we need the arts more than ever.
…
Digital composition software, notation tools, and recording platforms allow students to experiment, revise, and refine their ideas in ways that would have been far more time-consuming a decade ago. Students can layer tracks, hear immediate playback, annotate their own scores, and collaborate across devices. The same is true in other contexts besides music; in visual arts, for instance, a variety of digital drawing and painting platforms enable students to practice with new mediums, styles, and techniques without having to worry about supplies or messes. But in either case, the core intellectual work of looking and listening critically, understanding structure, and making aesthetic choices remains entirely human and part of the learning.
From DSC: I agree. At one of my previous positions, I spent 10 years supervising a digital studio — helping professors and students use a variety of applications to create things. The applications were from Adobe, Apple, and a variety of smaller vendors. The deliverables could be graphics, edited soundtracks, music, videos, flyers, posters, collages, edited photographs, presentations, websites, and more. I longed for people to discover the power of multimedia to communicate their messages, tell stories, stir emotion, powerfully engage themselves (and others), and unleash their creativity.
There were several obstacles to our digital studio being more impactful at that institution. It was under the IT department, not the academic side of the house. It was in the basement of the library, where few students and faculty traveled. During those years, it was highly uncommon for faculty members to require multimedia-based assignments — so many students had to WANT to develop these skills on their own time. The majority of students didn’t see the value in developing the types of digital skills that we were trying to build…or they didn’t have the time.
6 Reasons Universities Are Building Media Labs Now — from edtechmagazine.com by Brad Grimes Digital production centers help institutions close the gap between academic training and professional practice.
Higher education is undergoing a significant transformation in how it prepares the next generation of media professionals. Across the country, universities are investing in state-of-the-art media labs — facilities built not around traditional classroom instruction, but around the tools, workflows and collaborative environments that define today’s professional production landscape. These spaces represent a fundamental rethinking of what it means to train students for careers in film, animation, gaming and digital storytelling.
Character consistency, native audio, 15-second generations & first results
Image & Video Prompts
Imagine Art 1.5 Pro, Genspark AI Workspace 2.0 & PixVerse Real-Time Video Workflows
Kling 3.0: Everyone a Director
Kling just dropped version 3.0, and it’s a legitimate leap forward for AI video production (Kling is the GOAT). After spending early access time testing the new capabilities, I can confirm this is the most significant update to video generation tools I’ve seen in months.
Free Music Discovery Tools — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan and Chris Dalla Riva Travel through time and around the world with sound
I love apps like Metronaut and Tomplay, which let me carry a collection of classical (sheet) music on my phone. They also provide piano or orchestral accompaniment for any violin piece I want to play.
Today’s post shares 10 other recommended tools for music lovers from my fellow writer and friend, Chris Dalla Riva, who writes Can’t Get Much Higher, a popular Substack focused on the intersection of music and data. I invited Chris to share with you his favorite resources for discovering, learning, and creating music.
Why does it matter?
AI voice cloning has already flooded the internet with unauthorized imitations, blurring legal and ethical lines. By offering a dynamic, rights-secured platform, ElevenLabs aims to legitimize the booming AI voice industry and enable transparent, collaborative commercialization of iconic IP. .
. Data released by OpenAI in September from an internal study of queries sent to ChatGPT showed that most are for personal use, not work.
Emotional conversations were also common in the conversations analyzed by The Post, and users often shared highly personal details about their lives. In some chats, the AI tool could be seen adapting to match a user’s viewpoint, creating a kind of personalized echo chamber in which ChatGPT endorsed falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said his own research has suggested ChatGPT’s design encourages people to form emotional attachments with the chatbot. “The optimization and incentives towards intimacy are very clear,” he said. “ChatGPT is trained to further or deepen the relationship.”
Per The Rundown:OpenAI just shared its view on AI progress, predicting systems will soon become smart enough to make discoveries and calling for global coordination on safety, oversight, and resilience as the technology nears superintelligent territory.
The details:
OpenAI said current AI systems already outperform top humans in complex intellectual tasks and are “80% of the way to an AI researcher.”
The company expects AI will make small scientific discoveries by 2026 and more significant breakthroughs by 2028, as intelligence costs fall 40x per year.
For superintelligent AI, OAI said work with governments and safety agencies will be essential to mitigate risks like bioterrorism or runaway self-improvement.
It also called for safety standards among top labs, a resilience ecosystem like cybersecurity, and ongoing tracking of AI’s real impact to inform public policy.
Why it matters: While the timeline remains unclear, OAI’s message shows that the world should start bracing for superintelligent AI with coordinated safety. The company is betting that collective safeguards will be the only way to manage risk from the next era of intelligence, which may diffuse in ways humanity has never seen before.
Which linked to:
AI progress and recommendations — from openai.com AI is unlocking new knowledge and capabilities. Our responsibility is to guide that power toward broad, lasting benefit.
From DSC: I hate to say this, but it seems like there is growing concern amongst those who have pushed very hard to release as much AI as possible — they are NOW worried. They NOW step back and see that there are many reasons to worry about how these technologies can be negatively used.
Where was this level of concern before (while they were racing ahead at 180 mph)? Surely, numerous and knowledgeable people inside those organizations warned them about the destructive/downside of these technologies. But their warnings were pretty much blown off (at least from my limited perspective).
Most organizations are still in the experimentation or piloting phase: Nearly two-thirds of respondents say their organizations have not yet begun scaling AI across the enterprise.
High curiosity in AI agents: Sixty-two percent of survey respondents say their organizations are at least experimenting with AI agents.
Positive leading indicators on impact of AI: Respondents report use-case-level cost and revenue benefits, and 64 percent say that AI is enabling their innovation. However, just 39 percent report EBIT impact at the enterprise level.
High performers use AI to drive growth, innovation, and cost: Eighty percent of respondents say their companies set efficiency as an objective of their AI initiatives, but the companies seeing the most value from AI often set growth or innovation as additional objectives.
Redesigning workflows is a key success factor: Half of those AI high performers intend to use AI to transform their businesses, and most are redesigning workflows.
Differing perspectives on employment impact: Respondents vary in their expectations of AI’s impact on the overall workforce size of their organizations in the coming year: 32 percent expect decreases, 43 percent no change, and 13 percent increases.
Spatial intelligence is the next frontier in AI, demanding powerful world models to realize its full potential. World models should reconstruct, generate, and simulate 3D worlds; and allow both humans and agents to interact with them. Spatially intelligent world models will transform a wide variety of industries over the coming years.
Two months ago we shared a preview of Marble, our World Model that creates 3D worlds from image or text prompts. Since then, Marble has been available to an early set of beta users to create 3D worlds for themselves.
Today we are making Marble, a first-in-class generative multimodal world model, generally available for anyone to use. We have also drastically expanded Marble’s capabilities, and are excited to highlight them here:
At Adobe MAX 2025 in Los Angeles, the company dropped an entire creative AI ecosystem that touches every single part of the creative workflow. In our opinion, all these new features aren’t about replacing creators; it’s about empowering them with superpowers they can actually control.
Adobe’s new plan is to put an AI co-pilot in every single app.
For professionals, the game-changer is Firefly Custom Models. Start training one now to create a consistent, on-brand look for all your assets.
For everyday creators, the AI Assistants in Photoshop and Express will drastically speed up your workflow.
The best place to start is the Photoshop AI Assistant (currently in private beta), which offers a powerful glimpse into the future of creative software—a future where you’re less of a button-pusher and more of a creative director.
Adobe MAX Day 2: The Storyteller Is Still King, But AI Is Their New Superpower — from theneuron.ai by Grant Harvey Adobe’s Day 2 keynote showcased a suite of AI-powered creative tools designed to accelerate workflows, but the real message from creators like Mark Rober and James Gunn was clear: technology serves the story, not the other way around.
On the second day of its annual MAX conference, Adobe drove home a message that has been echoing through the creative industry for the past year: AI is not a replacement, but a partner. The keynote stage featured a powerful trio of modern storytellers—YouTube creator Brandon Baum, science educator and viral video wizard Mark Rober, and Hollywood director James Gunn—who each offered a unique perspective on a shared theme: technology is a powerful tool, but human instinct, hard work, and the timeless art of storytelling remain paramount.
From DSC: As Grant mentioned, the demos dealt with ideation, image generation, video generation, audio generation, and editing.
The creative software giant is launching new generative AI tools that make digital voiceovers and custom soundtracks for videos, and adding AI assistants to Express and Photoshop for web that edit entire projects using descriptive prompts. And that’s just the start, because Adobe is planning to eventually bring AI assistants to all of its design apps.
From DSC: I posted an excerpt of this in another posting, but I wanted to highlight these two powerful, extremely well-done video series for those who might be interested in them.
The House of David is very well done! I enjoyed watching Season 1. LikeThe Chosen, it brings the Bible to life in excellent, impactful ways! Both series convey the context and cultural tensions at the time. Both series are an answer to prayer for me and many others — as they are professionally-done. Both series match anything that comes out of Hollywood in terms of the acting, script writing, music, the sets, etc. Again, both of these series are very well done. .
.
A sampling of others who cover The Chosen includes:
A median of 34% of adults across 25 countries are more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence in daily life. A median of 42% are equally concerned and excited, and 16% are more excited than concerned.
Older adults, women, people with less education and those who use the internet less often are particularly likely to be more concerned than excited.
Veo 3.1 brings richer audio and object-level editing to Google Flow
Sora 2 is here with Cameo self-insertion and collaborative Remix features
Ray3 brings world-first reasoning and HDR to video generation
Kling 2.5 Turbo delivers faster, cheaper, more consistent results
WAN 2.5 revolutionizes talking head creation with perfect audio sync
House of David Season 2 Trailer
HeyGen Agent, Hailuo Agent, Topaz Astra, and Lovable Cloud updates
Image & Video Prompts
From DSC: By the way, the House of David (which Heather referred to) is very well done! I enjoyed watching Season 1. LikeThe Chosen, it brings the Bible to life in excellent, impactful ways! Both series convey the context and cultural tensions at the time. Both series are an answer to prayer for me and many others — as they are professionally-done. Both series match anything that comes out of Hollywood in terms of the acting, script writing, music, the sets, etc. Both are very well done. .
[On 10/21/25] we’re introducing ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core.
AI gives us a rare moment to rethink what it means to use the web. Last year, we added search in ChatGPT so you could instantly find timely information from across the internet—and it quickly became one of our most-used features. But your browser is where all of your work, tools, and context come together. A browser built with ChatGPT takes us closer to a true super-assistant that understands your world and helps you achieve your goals.
With Atlas, ChatGPT can come with you anywhere across the web—helping you in the window right where you are, understanding what you’re trying to do, and completing tasks for you, all without copying and pasting or leaving the page. Your ChatGPT memory is built in, so conversations can draw on past chats and details to help you get new things done.
ChatGPT Atlas: the AI browser test — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg Chat GPT Atlas aims to transform web browsing into a conversational, AI-native experience, but early reviews are mixed
OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Atlas promises to merge web browsing, search, and automation into a single interface — an “AI-native browser” meant to make the web conversational. After testing it myself, though, I’m still trying to see the real breakthrough. It feels familiar: summaries, follow-ups, and even the Agent’s task handling all mirror what I already do inside ChatGPT.
Here’s how it works: Atlas can see what you’re looking at on any webpage and instantly help without you needing to copy/paste or switch tabs. Researching hotels? Ask ChatGPT to compare prices right there. Reading a dense article? Get a summary on the spot. The AI lives in the browser itself.
The latest entry in AI browsers is Atlas – A new browser from OpenAI. Atlas would feel similar to Dia or Comet if you’ve used them. It has an “Ask ChatGPT” sidebar that has the context of your page, and choose “Agent” to work on that tab. Right now, Agent is limited to a single tab, and it is way too slow to delegate anything for real to it. Click accuracy for Agent is alright on normal web pages, but it will definitely trip up if you ask it to use something like Google Sheets.
One ambient feature that I think many people will like is “select to rewrite” – You can select any text in Atlas, hover/click on the blue dot in the top right corner to rewrite it using AI.
Summary: Job seekers are using “prompt hacking” — embedding hidden AI commands in white font on resumes — to try to trick applicant tracking systems. While some report success, recruiters warn the tactic could backfire and eliminate the candidate from consideration.
The Job Market Might Be a Mess, But Don’t Blame AI Just Yet — from builtin.com by Matthew Urwin A new study by Yale University and the Brookings Institution says the panic around artificial intelligence stealing jobs is overblown. But that might not be the case for long.
Summary: A Yale and Brookings study finds generative AI has had little impact on U.S. jobs so far, with tariffs, immigration policies and the number of college grads potentially playing a larger role. Still, AI could disrupt the workforce in the not-so-distant future.
In short, it’s been a monumental 12 months for AI. Our eighth annual report is the most comprehensive it’s ever been, covering what you need to know about research, industry, politics, and safety – along with our first State of AI Usage Survey of 1,200 practitioners.
The 4 Rs framework Salesforce has developed what Holt Ware calls the “4 Rs for AI agent success.” They are:
Redesign by combining AI and human capabilities. This requires treating agents like new hires that need proper onboarding and management.
Reskilling should focus on learning future skills. “We think we know what they are,” Holt Ware notes, “but they will continue to change.”
Redeploy highly skilled people to determine how roles will change. When Salesforce launched an AI coding assistant, Holt Ware recalls, “We woke up the next day and said, ‘What do we do with these people now that they have more capacity?’ ” Their answer was to create an entirely new role: Forward-Deployed Engineers. This role has since played a growing part in driving customer success.
Rebalance workforce planning. Holt Ware references a CHRO who “famously said that this will be the last year we ever do workforce planning and it’s only people; next year, every team will be supplemented with agents.”
Our latest video generation model is more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems. It also features synchronized dialogue and sound effects. Create with it in the new Sora app.
The Rundown: OpenAI just released Sora 2, its latest video model that now includes synchronized audio and dialogue, alongside a new social app where users can create, remix, and insert themselves into AI videos through a “Cameos” feature.
… Why it matters: Model-wise, Sora 2 looks incredible — pushing us even further into the uncanny valley and creating tons of new storytelling capabilities. Cameos feels like a new viral memetic tool, but time will tell whether the AI social app can overcome the slop-factor and have staying power past the initial novelty.
OpenAI Just Dropped Sora 2 (And a Whole New Social App) — from heneuron.ai by Grant Harvey OpenAI launched Sora 2 with a new iOS app that lets you insert yourself into AI-generated videos with realistic physics and sound, betting that giving users algorithm control and turning everyone into active creators will build a better social network than today’s addictive scroll machines.
What Sora 2 can do
Generate Olympic-level gymnastics routines, backflips on paddleboards (with accurate buoyancy!), and triple axels.
Follow intricate multi-shot instructions while maintaining world state across scenes.
Create realistic background soundscapes, dialogue, and sound effects automatically.
Insert YOU into any video after a quick one-time recording (they call this “cameos”).
The best video to show what it can do is probably this one, from OpenAI researcher Gabriel Peters, that depicts the behind the scenes of Sora 2 launch day…
Sora 2: AI Video Goes Social — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg OpenAI’s latest AI video model is now an iOS app, letting users generate, remix, and even insert themselves into cinematic clips
Technically, Sora 2 is a major leap. It syncs audio with visuals, respects physics (a basketball bounces instead of teleporting), and follows multi-shot instructions with consistency. That makes outputs both more controllable and more believable. But the app format changes the game: it transforms world simulation from a research milestone into a social, co-creative experience where entertainment, creativity, and community intersect.
Also along the lines of creating digital video, see:
What used to take hours in After Effects now takes just one text prompt. Tools like Google’s Nano Banana, Seedream 4, Runway’s Aleph, and others are pioneering instruction-based editing, a breakthrough that collapses complex, multi-step VFX workflows into a single, implicit direction.
The history of VFX is filled with innovations that removed friction, but collapsing an entire multi-step workflow into a single prompt represents a new kind of leap.
For creators, this means the skill ceiling is no longer defined by technical know-how, it’s defined by imagination. If you can describe it, you can create it. For the industry, it points toward a near future where small teams and solo creators compete with the scale and polish of large studios.
Something big shifted this week. OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into a platform – not just a product.With apps now running inside ChatGPT and a no-code Agent Builder for creating full AI workflows, the line between “using AI” and “building with AI” is fading fast. Developers suddenly have a new playground, and for the first time, anyone can assemble their own intelligent system without touching code. The question isn’t what AI can do anymore – it’s what you’ll make it do.
Strategic partnership enables OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems representing millions of GPUs for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure.
To support the partnership, NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed.
The first gigawatt of NVIDIA systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026 on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.
Why this matters: The partnership kicks off in the second half of 2026 with NVIDIA’s new Vera Rubin platform. OpenAI will use this massive compute power to train models beyond what we’ve seen with GPT-5 and likely also power what’s called inference (when you ask a question to chatGPT, and it gives you an answer). And NVIDIA gets a guaranteed customer for their most advanced chips. Infinite money glitch go brrr am I right? Though to be fair, this kinda deal is as old as the AI industry itself.
This isn’t just about bigger models, mind you: it’s about infrastructure for what both companies see as the future economy. As Sam Altman put it, “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future.”
… Our take: We think this news is actually super interesting when you pair it with the other big headline from today: Commonwealth Fusion Systems signed a commercial deal worth more than $1B with Italian energy company Eni to purchase fusion power from their 400 MW ARC plant in Virginia. Here’s what that means for AI…
AI filmmaker Dinda Prasetyo just released “Skyland,” a fantasy short film about a guy named Aeryn and his “loyal flying fish”, and honestly, the action sequences look like they belong in an actual film…
SKYLAND | AI Short Film Fantasy
Skyland is an AI-powered fantasy short film that takes you on a breathtaking journey with Aeryn Solveth and his loyal flying fish. From soaring above the futuristic city of Cybryne to returning to his homeland of Eryndor, Aeryn’s adventure is… https://t.co/Lz6UUxQvExpic.twitter.com/cYXs9nwTX3
What’s wild is that Dinda used a cocktail of AI tools (Adobe Firefly, MidJourney, the newly launched Luma Ray 3, and ElevenLabs) to create something that would’ve required a full production crew just two years ago.
The Era of Prompts Is Over. Here’s What Comes Next. — from builtin.com by Ankush Rastogi If you’re still prompting your AI, you’re behind the curve. Here’s how to prepare for the coming wave of AI agents.
Summary: Autonomous AI agents are emerging as systems that handle goals, break down tasks and integrate with tools without constant prompting. Early uses include call centers, healthcare, fraud detection and research, but concerns remain over errors, compliance risks and unchecked decisions.
The next shift is already peeking around the corner, and it’s going to make prompts look primitive. Before long, we won’t be typing carefully crafted requests at all. We’ll be leaning on autonomous AI agents, systems that don’t just spit out answers but actually chase goals, make choices and do the boring middle steps without us guiding them. And honestly, this jump might end up dwarfing the so-called “prompt revolution.”
A new way to get things done with your AI browsing assistant Imagine you’re a student researching a topic for a paper, and you have dozens of tabs open. Instead of spending hours jumping between sources and trying to connect the dots, your new AI browsing assistant — Gemini in Chrome1 — can do it for you. Gemini can answer questions about articles, find references within YouTube videos, and will soon be able to help you find pages you’ve visited so you can pick up exactly where you left off.
Rolling out to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. with their language set to English, Gemini in Chrome can understand the context of what you’re doing across multiple tabs, answer questions and integrate with other popular Google services, like Google Docs and Calendar. And it’ll be available on both Android and iOS soon, letting you ask questions and summarize pages while you’re on the go.
We’re also developing more advanced agentic capabilities for Gemini in Chrome that can perform multi-step tasks for you from start to finish, like ordering groceries. You’ll remain in control as Chrome handles the tedious work, turning 30-minute chores into 3-click user journeys.
