OYLA deliberately does not use generative artificial intelligence to write, create, or edit the text of our articles. This isn’t fear of the technology — it’s an editorial principle, and there’s a specific idea behind it.
We’ve experimented extensively with today’s AI tools, and we keep doing so. We consider artificial intelligence one of the most powerful technologies humans have built, and we’re not going to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Adults and teenagers alike will need to learn to work with AI. OYLA wants to be part of that education — not a bystander pretending the technology stopped moving.
Most modern language models are probabilistic systems. They generate the most likely continuation of a text, based on enormous volumes of text that already exists. That makes them remarkably useful — and, at the same time, prone to averaging.
The most probable-sounding answer is often the most generic one — the one that resembles a million other answers. Fine for a draft. Not quite enough for thinking.
Our job as a magazine isn’t just to give a child the right answer — it’s to walk them through the path to that answer. What matters to us is not only what a child learns, but how they got there.
That’s why OYLA’s texts are written and edited by people — writers, editors, and science advisors who walk this path themselves before offering it to the reader.
When every question gets an instant, averaged answer, it’s easy to end up with knowledge without understanding.
The ability to ask an unexpected question, doubt the obvious, notice what others missed, be wrong, and change your mind isn’t a side effect of thinking. It is thinking.
Our position isn’t that AI is bad. It’s that AI should remain a tool a person uses, not a replacement for their thinking.
We want the next generation to be able to use the most powerful tools humanity has ever built. But first, we want them to learn to think for themselves.
