Nowadays, the AI field is changing rapidly. Text generation, image expansion, and video production can all be accomplished with the help of AI tools. Finding materials, making plans, and writing reports can be done with a "one-click" action. However, while AI tools bring convenience to people's work and life, they also bring some challenges. Recently, a survey conducted by the Social Survey Center of China Youth Daily in collaboration with wenjuan.com among 1,333 young people showed that 73.5% of the interviewed young people worry that the popularization of AI tools will make individuals' expressive abilities worse.

"AI tools are relatively efficient and can save me a lot of time." Su Yifei (pseudonym), a post-00s college student living in Xiamen, is fairly skilled at using AI tools. When running his personal WeChat official account and publishing content, he uses AI tools to collect and organize information, and he feels this can improve efficiency.

Zhang Ran, a post-95s, works in product planning and marketing at a cultural company in Beijing. Zhang Ran occasionally uses AI tools to assist with some work tasks, such as collecting materials and providing copywriting references. "The process of using AI tools is more like reviewing my own thinking process. By continuously breaking down big questions into small ones, I can find suitable answers from them."

"New technologies will, to a certain extent, impact the original work and life, such as lifestyles and ways of thinking, and even bring changes in ways of expression." Zhang Ran feels that with the continuous updating and iteration of technology, AI tools will become increasingly popular, but when everyone gets used to seeking answers from AI tools rather than communicating with people around them, it may affect individuals' ways and abilities of expression, making them less good at expressing themselves.

The survey shows that 73.5% of the interviewed young people worry that the popularization of AI tools will make individuals' expressive abilities worse, among whom 20.9% said they are very worried.

"At present, AI tools, with natural language interaction as the entry point and large-scale data computing as the foundation, have brought fundamental changes to human writing and expression." Zheng Huanzhao, associate professor of the Department of Chinese at Jinan University, said that if emojis, internet buzzwords, and shallow internet colloquial culture are changes in human writing symbols under the influence of media, with their impact on human thinking and expression more reflected in the shift from refined thinking to coarse thinking, then the high intelligence of AI tools has already made them substitutive for human language expression and text writing. "From this perspective, the impact of AI tools on people's expressive abilities has already reached the level of creative thinking."

"While AI tools make work and life more efficient and convenient, they may also make people lazy in thinking and expressing." Liu Yuan, a post-90s worker in Hangzhou, feels that the content produced by AI tools lacks innovation and has limitations in uniqueness and imagination. "We often applaud others' wonderful speeches and are moved by a sincere piece of writing. This is the charm of language and text expression, and the profound meaning behind it is something AI tools do not have."

Su Yifei feels that AI tools make complex work simple. For example, previously finding relevant literature might require looking through a lot of materials, but now some time can be saved. However, he believes this will not make him give up thinking; instead, it will encourage him to view problems more comprehensively. "For example, when I see content displayed by AI tools, I will first judge whether it is accurate and whether there are problems in the logic, and then further consider where I might start and how to improve it if I were to answer myself."

The survey shows that with the arrival of the AI era, 85.6% of the interviewed young people believe that the ability to think independently and express oneself is more important now. Further analysis found that the proportion of post-80s respondents who agreed was higher, at 92.7%, followed by post-00s (90.4%).

"In the face of the convenience and intelligence of AI tools, we cannot simply reject or resist them. Instead, we should think about how to coexist with artificial intelligence's expression and writing." Zheng Huanzhao believes that AI tools can liberate people from tedious daily affairs to engage in creative work with language and text. "This means we need to improve media literacy and have the ability to use intelligent tools, while also cultivating language and text expression literacy and improving experiential, sensory, and creative language and text expression abilities."

Among the respondents to this survey, post-00s accounted for 14.1%, post-95s 21.0%, post-90s 40.7%, post-85s 14.9%, and post-80s 9.3%.