--- title: "Criticising AI content? Newspapers did that in 1978 too" author: Marc Diks date: 2026-07-07 modified: 2026-07-07 category: AI & Strategy reading_time: 16 min url: https://www.marcdiks.nl/en/blog/ai-content-criticism-1978 canonical: https://www.marcdiks.nl/en/blog/ai-content-criticism-1978 language: en --- # Criticising AI content? Newspapers did that in 1978 too > **TL;DR** > > - **1978 already had AI panic.** A newspaper headline about calculators in schools reads almost word-for-word like today's criticism of AI. > - **The pattern is 2,400 years old.** From the comic book to Plato's critique of writing: every new technology gets the same fear of "mental laziness". > - **Age explains usage, not scepticism.** Young people use AI the most and are the most pessimistic about it — older people mostly hesitate because they aren't participating. > - **The psychology is well documented.** Research shows that "today's youth" always falls short in exactly the skill the complainer is good at. > - **Judge the content, not the tool.** Is it accurate, does it add value, does someone stand behind it — those are the only questions that ever mattered. On 21 June 1978, the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden ran the headline: "Little machine will soon do the schoolwork sums." Above it, in smaller type: some fear mental laziness. Replace "little machine" with AI and this newspaper page could be reprinted tomorrow. Same fear. Same arguments. Same tone. ## The report that suddenly became worth less The reason I dove into the newspaper archives was a pattern that has been bothering me for months. I produce a lot of reports and analyses with the help of AI. I check the content myself, the conclusions are mine, and so is the responsibility. But I notice something strange: as soon as it becomes known that AI helped write something, the reception changes. Same piece, same numbers, same conclusions. Yet it gets read differently. More critically, more sparingly, with a certain distrust that wasn't there before. The questions then shift from the content to how it came about. As if a report becomes less true once a machine helped formulate it. I saw exactly this mood recently in my own LinkedIn feed. [René van der Zel](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7478681483554037760/), founder of [XXL Nutrition](https://xxlnutrition.com) and an entrepreneur I genuinely admire for what he's built, opened a post with: "Ugh... enough to drive you crazy, all that AI sh*t on LinkedIn." ![LinkedIn post by René van der Zel, founder of XXL Nutrition: "Ugh... enough to drive you crazy, all that AI sh*t on LinkedIn", with 1,179 likes and 199 comments](/ai-content-kritiek-1978-01-linkedin-rene-van-der-zel.webp) Well over a thousand likes, two hundred comments, mostly in agreement. I get the irritation, because that garbage (AI slop) genuinely exists. More on that later. But the conclusion cuts too many corners for me. Someone who built a sports nutrition company into something big doesn't blame the barbell for a bad training programme either. They look at the coach. That exact mix-up between tool and user is the thread running through this whole story. The nicest detail, by the way, was in the comments under that post: several people jokingly asked whether this message itself had been written by AI. Even the complaint about AI content can no longer be distinguished from AI content. There's more wisdom in that than the joke-makers realised. Something else stands out in my own circle: the reaction is strongest among people who don't use AI daily themselves, and in my world that's noticeably often people over fifty. That raised the question for me of whether age is really the explanation here, or whether something else is going on. The answer from the research comes later, and it's more uncomfortable than a generational joke. First, the evidence that this pattern is much older than AI. And there's a practical problem underneath this way of judging things. The question "was this made with AI?" becomes harder to answer every month. AI is now built into Word, into Outlook, into the search engine, into the spellchecker that rewrites your sentences. Anyone who wants to devalue documents based on AI use will soon have to devalue almost everything. The criterion dies out on its own. The only question that remains is the one that was always the right one: is the content any good? ## Twenty-odd headlines, seven technologies, one script I searched [Delpher](https://www.delpher.nl), the Royal Library's newspaper archive with more than 18 million pages, and the archive of [De Krant van Toen](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do). Within a day I had more than twenty headlines in which a new technology was dismissed as a threat to our minds, our children or our civilisation. A selection, in chronological order. 1948, the comic book. De Volkskrant runs the headline: ["Comic books are poisoning our youth"](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22beeldromans+vergiftigen+de+jeugd%22&coll=ddd), urging "the government must intervene!". Delpher lists 233 articles about the "danger" of comic books. The medium that was supposedly poisoning young people is now cultural heritage with its own museums. 1953, television. The Netherlands had been a television nation for barely two years, and the verdict was already in. ["Culturally still worthless"](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22cultureel+nog+zonder+waarde%22&coll=ddd), says Father Wesseling in Dagblad de Stem. 1956, the pinball machine. [Tilburg bans them](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22Flipperkasten+zijn+voortaan+in+Tilburg+verboden%22&coll=ddd). Really: a municipal ban on pinball machines. 1962, the ballpoint pen. ["Still prefer not to use the ballpoint"](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22Toch+liever+niet+met+de+balpen%22&coll=ddd), headlines the Algemeen Handelsblad above a letter, in the middle of a reader debate about whether this new writing tool could handle proper handwriting. A pen. We argued about a pen. 1972, the computer. The newspaper De Waarheid had to reassure readers: ["No grounds for computer fear: the electronic brain is a slave"](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22Voor+computervrees+geen+grond%22&coll=ddd). The article literally states that a kind of "computer fear" had arisen from "computer horror stories". The home computer wouldn't even be invented for years. 1978, the calculator. The article I opened with. Secondary school pupils leave the "dumb" arithmetic to the device, and some fear mental laziness. [The full article is online](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do), including the opening line I'm giving everyone for free: "Convenience serves people." 1998, the internet. Nieuwsblad van het Noorden interviews an expert about an American study claiming internet users become depressed. The headline: ["Depressed from the internet? More likely fear of the unknown"](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do). Something remarkable happens in that article. The interviewee compares the internet panic of 1998 to the television panic of the 1950s. Countless experts warned back then about the device's corrupting influence, "but the opposite has proven true: more people are better informed than ever." 2006, the mobile phone. The Netherlands holds [its first national mobile-free day](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do). Twenty-four hours without "mobile chatter". Twenty years later, that same phone sits in the pocket of everyone who took part in that theme day. Seven technologies, one script. First, the new technology is a threat to the mind. Then the experts appear to calm things down. Then it becomes normal. And then everyone forgets there was ever any panic, just in time to run the script again for the next invention. ## The argument that never changes Look again at that 1978 subheading: some fear mental laziness. That is, word for word, the same argument now being used against AI. Let a model write your text and you forget how to write. Let AI summarise and you forget how to read. Let AI calculate, think, formulate, and your mind grows lazy. It's the oldest complaint we have, and the first version is almost 2,400 years old. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the myth of the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing. Theuth presents his invention to King Thamus as an aid to memory and wisdom. Thamus rejects it: writing will instead plant forgetfulness in the souls of those who use it. Anyone who writes things down stops training their memory and blindly trusts signs outside themselves. Such people will have the appearance of wisdom, Thamus warns. They will seem to know much, but won't be able to defend their knowledge, because written words stay silent when questioned. You can read the whole account at the [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/). And here's the irony. The only reason we still know this warning against writing is that Plato wrote it down! The tool that was supposed to hollow out wisdom turned out, for 24 centuries, to be its best carrier. Ever since, every shift of thinking work onto a tool has been met with the same fear. And every time, the new medium preserved the complaint against itself. And to be fair, the complaint is never entirely nonsense. I do arithmetic in my head worse than my father did. Facts my parents memorised, I look up. First in an encyclopedia, then via Google, now via AI. Something really does disappear. But the question isn't whether something disappears. The question is whether we're worse off as a whole. And history gives a clear answer there. The generation that learned arithmetic with the calculator built the internet. The generation "addicted" to the television screen became the best-informed generation up to that point, exactly as that expert noted back in 1998. The thinking work didn't disappear. It moved up a level: from calculating to interpreting, from memorising facts to making connections. I see that same shift in my own work. I don't write code, and yet I build working tools: scanners, dashboards, benchmarks. AI handles the syntax; I handle the thinking above it: what should it do, for whom, and is the output actually correct. That skill didn't even exist ten years ago. Anyone who calls that "mental laziness" hasn't paid attention to what's actually happening. A skill disappears at the bottom and a skill emerges at the top. That's how it went with the calculator. That's how it's going again now. ## Is it age after all? Now the question I left open above. Is my observation correct that the criticism mostly comes from people over fifty, or is that just my own bias? The honest answer: it's half right, and the half that's right means something different than you'd think. First, the part that's right. Age is the strongest predictor of AI use there is. In February 2026, [Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions-and-use-of-ai-differ-by-age/) surveyed more than five thousand American adults: 66% of people under 30 use AI chatbots, versus 23% of those 65 and older. Daily use: a third of people under 50, versus 7% of those 65 and older. And only 6% of people 65 and older feel very confident using these tools, versus 31% of the youngest group. The gap is real. But then the part that's wrong, and I think it's the nicest finding in that whole dataset. Anyone who thinks older people are the big AI sceptics has it backwards. The biggest sceptics are actually the youngest users: 48% of adults under 30 expect AI to do net harm to society over the next twenty years. Among those 65 and older, that's 35%. What older people answer more often instead: "I don't know." The difference between generations isn't scepticism. It's participation. Young people are gloomy about AI and use it every day, because they're adapting to a reality that's coming regardless. Older people more often stand on the sidelines, not out of deep conviction, but out of uncertainty. And uncertainty that doesn't want to show itself likes to disguise itself as disdain. "I don't know how this works" sounds vulnerable. "What AI garbage" sounds powerful. It's the same sentence twice. ## Why your own youth always wins Psychology has this mechanism well mapped by now. In 2019, John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler published five pre-registered studies in [Science Advances](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31663012/) involving 3,458 American adults, on the question of why every generation complains that "today's youth" fall short. Their findings are sobering. First: the complaint says more about the complainer than about the youth. Authoritarian people mainly think young people no longer have respect. Intelligent people mainly think young people are getting dumber. Well-read people mainly think young people no longer read. Whatever someone is good at, that's precisely where they see other people's shortcomings. Second, and this is the sharpest part: our memory cheats. Adults unconsciously project their current level back onto their own youth. The well-read fifty-something remembers teenage years full of books that never actually happened. Compare that polished memory to the real, messy youth of today, and the decline looks proven. Protzko and Schooler even showed you can manipulate this effect: people who were (falsely) told they themselves scored poorly on reading suddenly judged young people's reading habits more leniently. Sociologist David Finkelhor gave the broader phenomenon a name in 2011: [juvenoia](https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-02/juvenoia-paper.pdf), adults' exaggerated fear that social and technological change is damaging young people. That fear cares little for facts. And underneath it lies another layer: our identity forms during the years roughly between fifteen and twenty-five. The music from back then stays the best music, the manners from back then stay the norm, the tools from back then stay "real work". Psychologists call the associated memory peak the reminiscence bump. Anyone who later sees a technology emerge that replaces their own formative norms isn't defending a way of working. They're defending themselves. This is why I don't want to make the generational joke. The secondary school pupils in the 1978 photo were the AI natives of their time, to the annoyance of some who feared mental laziness. Those same pupils are now around sixty, and some of them scroll past AI content shaking their heads. Not because they're stupid or stubborn, but because the mechanism is universal. Today's AI native is 2050's complainer. Understanding that makes you judge today's sceptics more gently, and your own future self too. ## What the sceptics get right Now the uncomfortable part for my own camp. Anyone who dismisses every AI objection as old-fashioned fear makes the same mistake as the complainers themselves: judging the message by its origin instead of its content. Because there really is a lot of AI garbage. Meaningless LinkedIn posts, forty-page reports that could be summarised in three sentences, texts that sound like everyone and therefore like no one. The phenomenon is so widespread that [Merriam-Webster named "slop" its word of the year for 2025](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year): low-quality digital content, mass-produced with AI. René and the hundreds of people agreeing under his post are simply right on this point. In 1948, most comic books really were pulp too. The complainers back then saw the garbage clearly. What they didn't see: the garbage was a feature of the early phase and of lazy creators, not of the medium. In the comments under René's post, incidentally, there was a prediction I share: as the flood of slop grows, a genuine voice becomes scarcer and therefore more valuable. Several commenters expected the problem to solve itself, because hollow posts naturally lose their reach. That's true, but notice what this argument actually says. The filter that will clean up the garbage is quality. Not origin. A hollow post written by a human will soon lose out just as hard as a hollow post written by a machine. On top of that, AI output is unreliable in a way that undermines trust. I wrote earlier about [AI that hallucinates and forces mathematical breakthroughs at the same time](/en/blog/ai-hallucinations-and-mathematical-breakthroughs): you have a brilliant but absent-minded professor living in your laptop. Anyone who forwards an AI report blindly, without checking it, earns the distrust they get. But notice what's happening here. All of this legitimate criticism is about the content: is it accurate, does it add value, does someone stand behind it. None of this criticism is about whether a machine was involved. That distinction is exactly where the judgment of AI work goes wrong. ## Judge the report, not the pen So for everyone who gets reports, advice and analyses on their desk, I have one proposal. The next time you receive an AI report, don't ask "was this made with AI?" Ask the three questions that always mattered: Is it accurate? Are the figures correct, are the sources real, are the conclusions logical. That's just as checkable in an AI report as in a handwritten one. In fact, ask the author about their review process. Anyone who uses AI well can show you that process. Does it add value? An empty report stays empty, however it was made. A sharp report stays sharp. Does someone stand behind it? Responsibility doesn't shift to the tool. Whoever submits the piece signs off on it. That was true with the typewriter, and it's true with AI. Books by well-known public figures have been written by ghostwriters for decades, and few readers lose sleep over it. We judge those books on what's in them. Why would a quarterly report be any different? And that's also my answer to René, with all respect for what he's built. The frustration is justified, the target isn't. "AI garbage" isn't a property of AI, any more than a bad book is a property of the printing press. It's a property of creators who have nothing to say, and can now prove it faster than ever. Aim the irritation there, and in five years you won't have to look back at a post that by then reads like "still prefer not to use the ballpoint". And for anyone managing people who work with AI: the difference between AI garbage and AI quality doesn't lie in banning the tool, but in the skill of the user. That can be trained. In fact, [Article 4 of the AI Act](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/4/) even requires that training, as I worked out earlier in [AI Training Obligation 2026](/en/blog/ai-training-obligation-2026). There's more at stake for decision-makers than a fair judgment. Punish AI use, and you won't get employees who stop using AI. You'll get employees who stay quiet about AI. The tool doesn't disappear, only the transparency does. Then you'll be judging reports whose origin you no longer know, made by people who no longer dare tell you how they work. That's not a quality policy. That's an ostrich policy. ## Convenience serves people Back to that 1978 article. The photographer captured two secondary school pupils working with their little calculator. Those pupils are now around sixty. They've spent their entire working lives calculating with machines, and nobody distrusts their spreadsheets today just because a processor was involved. Somewhere in a newspaper archive in 2070, there will be an article from our own time. A worried piece about reports being written by AI, about young people forgetting how to formulate their own thoughts, about experts fearing mental laziness. The reader in 2070 will look twice at the date. And then smile, for the same reason we smile at the comic books of 1948. Convenience serves people. They already knew that in 1978. ## Sources - [Newspaper article "Little machine will soon do the schoolwork sums", Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 21 June 1978, via De Krant van Toen](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do) - [Newspaper article "Comic books are poisoning our youth", De Volkskrant, 3 June 1948, via Delpher](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22beeldromans+vergiftigen+de+jeugd%22&coll=ddd) - [Newspaper article "Where television is business. Culturally still worthless, says Father Wesseling", Dagblad de Stem, 3 April 1953, via Delpher](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22cultureel+nog+zonder+waarde%22&coll=ddd) - [Newspaper article "Pinball machines now banned in Tilburg", Nieuwe Tilburgsche Courant, 8 May 1956, via Delpher](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22Flipperkasten+zijn+voortaan+in+Tilburg+verboden%22&coll=ddd) - [Newspaper article "Still prefer not to use the ballpoint", Algemeen Handelsblad, 14 December 1962, via Delpher](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22Toch+liever+niet+met+de+balpen%22&coll=ddd) - [Newspaper article "No grounds for computer fear", De Waarheid, 13 July 1972, via Delpher](https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/results?query=%22Voor+computervrees+geen+grond%22&coll=ddd) - [Newspaper article "'Depressed from the internet? More likely fear of the unknown'", Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 1 September 1998, via De Krant van Toen](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do) - [Newspaper article "'Without my mobile I feel a bit naked'" on the first mobile-free day, Dagblad van het Noorden, 26 July 2006, via De Krant van Toen](https://dekrantvantoen.nl/index.do) - [Plato's critique of writing (Phaedrus): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/) - [Protzko, J. & Schooler, J.W. (2019), "Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking", Science Advances](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31663012/) - [Pew Research Center (June 17, 2026), "How opinions and use of AI differ by age"](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/how-opinions-and-use-of-ai-differ-by-age/) - [Finkelhor, D. (2011), "The Internet, Youth Safety and the Problem of 'Juvenoia'", University of New Hampshire](https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-02/juvenoia-paper.pdf) - [Merriam-Webster, Word of the Year 2025 ("slop")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year) - [EU AI Act, Article 4 (official text)](https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/4/)