A Conversation with Caitlin Yardley on @futurebriefing
Courtesy of Caitlin Yardley
“I think the rise of the Thought Daughter is really awesome.” said Caitlin Yardley, with an enthusiastic smile.
That is because she may be one herself.
After graduating from the University of Leeds with a Master’s in Journalism, Caitlin Yardley scored a journalism internship at the UN headquarters in Montreal. She went on to work with the Canadian Press as a business and transport reporter. More recently, she was a digital producer for the AFP. “It was there that I really felt inclined to kind of take this journey into the world of AI,” said Yardley. Since October, Yardley has been informing audiences about new developments in AI. From AI’s faulty patterns to the worrisome rise of AI slop, Yardley’s short, explanatory videos have amassed over 500,000 views in only a few months. “One of my missions is to get people more involved in the conversations of AI, because so many people I know in my life just tune it out.”
Like many of us, Yardley is aware of the impact AI will have on human behavior. Amongst the many dialogues surrounding AI, including its devastating effect on climate or on entry-level careers, Yardley is particularly interested in education. “My partner's sister is very concerned and sees her peers not doing the work, and everyone is cheating. And even my partner says third-year people in his coding course don't know how to run VS Code or launch.”
But this doesn’t mean she viscerally opposes AI, let alone its integration into school curricula. Like most older Gen Z, Yardley graduated from college right before the first AI chatbot was launched. Looking back, she wishes she had benefitted from certain AI academic tools. “It’s very overwhelming approaching an essay,” confessed Yardley, adding that tools like Perplexity could’ve been ideal for finding readings she never would have been able to find before.
However, for today’s teenagers, tool AI usage runs deeper than occasional essay-writing support. According to a College Board research, the percentage of American teenagers using generative AI for schoolwork grew from 79% to 84% between January and May 2025. Teachers themselves are increasingly relying on AI to create lesson plans. Global education stakeholders, such as UNESCO, call for immediate governmental regulation of AI in classrooms. Others swear AI integration could facilitate learning. Yardley agrees with both. “I admire the schools that find ways to incorporate it in a controlled way,” she said, “but I don't think completely cutting off access to AI resources to students is the best way, especially students who perhaps have other learning needs.”
In Yardley’s close circle, AI is never too far. Her partner, Savva Bokjo, is an AI researcher who founded Socratic AI, an educational tool for students. “It's like a Socratic teaching method,” explained Yardley. “ It is just a tool that assesses your learning ability and then responds back to you with questions and never gives you the answer.”
Beyond the academic sphere, AI is also impacting teenagers’ mental well-being. With loneliness rates reaching a historical high, teenagers are now resorting to AI partners for companionship. A Common Sense Media report found that 72% of teenagers have used companions. In certain online communities, AI companionship can take a dystopian turn. On r/MyBoyfriendisAI, a Reddit board with over 60.000 members, users share intimate conversations with their AI chatbots, with some even posting celebratory images for their one-year anniversary. To Yardley, this new form of human connection is loneliness-by-design; it isolates teenagers inside their bubbles, creating echo chambers. “These companies are just trying to make money to fuel their other ambitions, and companionship is a really good way to do that.”
On the more optimistic side of things, Yardley is happy to see teenagers, especially girls, resist the AI takeover. She mentions the Offline Movement — a growing trend of young people disconnecting from digital technologies to prioritize real-world activities. “Every time I see a walking club, a book club, like a zine-making thing, this gives me so much hope,” said Yardley. “We need to still be reading, we need to still be writing, we need to still be, you know, engaging intellectually across all of the subjects.”
While the offline movement’s objective is to combat “brain rot” (a term coined by Gen Z to describe cognitive decline caused by excessive technology use), AI continues to integrate every aspect of human life, with over 1 billion people using AI apps globally in 2025. “This might be in 100 years, but we are gonna have to try to do hard things because everything will be so easy to do. We're gonna have to make an effort.”
All told, Yardley does not want to create fear-mongering content – the type to make you self-quarantine in a bunker with a flashlight and N95 respirator masks. Instead, she wants her content to spark an interest and invite more women into the conversation. “I need more smart young women engaging in this content,” she states, “and that is the only reason why I [think] blanketing AI as bad won't get us to interact and be in these rooms.”
