6 in 10 Young Adults Fear AI Erodes Independence. Their Parents Just Brought It on Vacation.

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 holdout on new technology — had picked up the habit two weeks earlier, after her employer started pushing AI adoption. By the time the family checked into a hotel in Newport, R.I., she was greeting the chatbot by name each morning, cheerfully, like a fifth family member.

Waters, a millennial who says he approaches AI with skepticism and dread, found himself on the losing side of an unexpected generational split. He and his sister read paperbacks and worked Sudoku puzzles. His parents ran Claude through an unbroken stream of trip logistics and history trivia — enough that, by his account, he began to wonder whether his mother and father might actually manage to break it.

The piece, titled "The Uninvited Guest Who Crashed Our Family Vacation: My Mom's AI Chatbot", is a fairly rare thing in the AI news cycle: a mainstream feature built entirely around ordinary people using Claude for ordinary things — not a product launch, not a benchmark, not a funding round.

Waters ties the pattern to something OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said before about how different age groups use chatbots: college students treat it like an operating system, people in their 20s and 30s use it as a life adviser, and older users mostly treat it as a smarter Google. His parents fit squarely in that last group — and loved it. They told him the back-and-forth gave them a deeper understanding of whatever they were asking about than a single search ever could.

They were also struck by its manners, half-joking that their generation was raised to say please and thank you and appreciated getting the same courtesy back. What really won his mother over was how it handled being wrong — apologizing cleanly instead of getting defensive. Her own summary of the whole dynamic was blunt: "I know his flattery is fake, but I don't care."

That good will got tested once. Claude spelled Katherine of Aragon's name with a C, and Waters's mother — a devoted Philippa Gregory reader — corrected it on the spot. Claude held its ground, explaining that the queen was born in Spain as Catalina, so a C is defensible, while noting the English "Katherine" spelling is also acceptable. She grumbled about it to her husband that night. By the next morning she was back to asking it questions about Boston landmarks.

The family's last debate, on their final night, was whether Claude is a "he." (In France, apparently, Claude can be a woman's name too.) They put it to the source directly. Claude said "he" was fine, but noted that most people default to "it," since it has no body or personal identity.

None of this is really about the technology itself. Johns Hopkins sociologist Allison Pugh, interviewed for the piece, points out that younger generations use AI the most overall — but when older people actually adopt it, they tend to go all in, because a chatbot demands far less of what she calls "born-to-it" technical comfort than a scanner or a VCR ever did. Of every generation, she says, older users seem to engage with AI with something close to glee.

Waters isn't fully sold — he says he'd still rather take life advice from his golden retriever. But by the trip's end, even he was grudgingly grateful for Claude's rundown of Boston history.

If any of this sounds like your own family group chat, there's a version worth trying on purpose instead of by accident. The prompt above walks through who in your life might actually take to a chatbot — and exactly what to show them first so it sticks.