In 4 years, Generation Alpha begins coming of age. What will it mean for Korea?

A Gallup Korea poll of 2,674 students found that 67 percent had used AI in the previous week, with usage highest among high school students at 82.3 percent, as Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2024, comes of age in South Korea. The generation, shaped by AI from childhood, includes teen developers like 15-year-old Yoon Yeo-jun, who built the web app 'Wayver' using generative AI tools without formal coding training, and at local game startup Versework, teens make up about 10 percent of its roughly 50 employees.

The first generation to grow up with AI is reshaping Korea’s traditional paths to education, work and success For Chae Yeon-suh, 14, much of the day revolves around her iPhone. She listens to Japanese pop music on it, uses AI to help her learn Japanese and turns to ChatGPT or Gemini when she has a question about schoolwork or simply wants to know something. Her phone, tablet and laptop are all tools for satisfying her curiosity. “Adults may not know this, but we spend a lot of time using AI. I think I probably spend more time talking to AI than to real people,” she said. Chae belongs to Generation Alpha, the cohort generally defined as those born between 2010, the year Apple unveiled the iPad and Instagram made its debut, and 2024. The term was coined in 2008 by Australian social researcher and demographer Mark McCrindle, who chose the first letter of the Greek alphabet to signal the beginning of a new generational cycle. What earlier generations experienced as a digital revolution, from smartphones and tablets to social media, was simply the starting point for Alphas. AI is becoming just as ordinary, especially for the youngest among them, who may never remember a world without it. After years in the shadow of Generation Z, Generation Alpha is now coming into its own in South Korea. The oldest members will turn 16 this year, bringing a generation shaped from childhood by AI and an always-connected world into sharper focus. Born digital, raised with AI For Generation Alpha, technological fluency is less a learned skill than a condition of growing up. More than 67 percent of 2,674 students polled by Gallup Korea last year, ranging from fourth graders in elementary school to third-year high school students, said they had used AI in the previous week. Usage was highest among high school students at 82.3 percent, followed by middle school students at 69.8 percent. Even among elementary school students, more than half, or 51.2 percent, reported using AI during the same period. And for some students, that take-up is turning into tangible results. Yoon Yeo-jun, a third-year student at Gajaeul Middle School in Seoul, has never taken a coding class. Yet, he has already built a workspace app and is now developing his second. Dubbed “Wayver,” the web-based app, released in February, lets users organize and visualize their work on a canvas using Kanban boards, while exchanging feedback through video and voice messages. "I thought misunderstandings and freeloading in group projects came not from a lack of communication, but from a lack of records and accountability," Yoon told The Korea Herald in an interview Tuesday, drawing on his experience with school group projects. "I was already used to keeping track of my own tasks with a to-do list app, so it felt natural to think that if we could keep everything we agreed on in one digital repository, we could solve much of the inefficiency in communication." He built the app simply by telling generative AI tools, mainly Google AI Studio, what he wanted. The tools turned his instructions into code, and he launched the finished app on the cloud platform Vercel — a process commonly known as "vibe coding." "Since I didn’t have a developer or mentor around to turn to, I relied on AI whenever I ran into a problem, asking questions like, ‘What is really causing this error at the architectural level?’ That pushed me to dig into each problem from the ground up," Yoon said. Yoon is now developing his second app, “Ennous,” designed to address what he sees as AI’s tendency to forget context and simply agree with users. The 15-year-old vibe coder is among a growing number of teen developers reshaping Korea’s digital creation landscape. At Versework, a local game development startup, workers in their teens account for about 10 percent of its roughly 50 employees, with some taking on executive roles, according to news reports. The company develops user-generated games on Roblox, an online platform where anyone can create and monetize games using free tools. Some of its teen developers have left school to work full time, while others remain students, heading to the office after classes. Lee Su-jin, a researcher at Seoul National University’s Consumer Trend Center, says growing up in a digital environment has given Generation Alpha a hybrid way of perceiving the world, one that makes little distinction between online and offline. “For them, life unfolds in a seamless ‘phygital’ space, where physical and digital experiences naturally blend together. A classroom can extend into an online space, just as play can move naturally between a playground and a digital platform,” Lee said in a report. That does not necessarily mean children spend all their time behind screens. Rather, digital communication has become intertwined with their offline lives. “When they’re on the swings together, they send each other photos and chat through DMs, then go right back to playing,” said Song Ji-a, a homemaker in Seoul’s Songpa-gu district who has a 10-year-old daughter. Some students go digital first when learning how to communicate in groups. Lim Woo-jin, a 16-year-old member of a middle school debate club in Seoul, said using AI during debates has helped cut down on unnecessary arguments. “When we make an argument, we can quickly look up the statistics or examples we need. That means we can focus more on whether our argument actually makes sense. Before, we sometimes got stuck arguing over specific numbers or facts, which felt like a waste of time," he said. No more one-size-fits-all These digital natives could also be growing up with a clearer sense of who they are and what they like. Moving seamlessly across social media platforms, they express themselves in their own ways and connect with like-minded others, while algorithms constantly feed them content, communities and interests tailored to their preferences. Their embrace of individuality is hardly unique to Korea. But it is particularly striking here, where conformity has long been a powerful cultural norm. "From decorating everyday items with stickers or charms to suit their personal tastes to the rise of ‘chugumi,’ a Korean buzzword referring to an image or aesthetic one aspires to, new trends continue to emerge that reflect a move away from uniform tastes and consumption," Kim Jeong-sook, a professor of consumer information studies at Keimyung University, said in a report. "AI is also lowering language and cultural barriers, making Generation Alpha more open not only to expressing their own individuality, but also to different people and cultures." Accessory shops at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Shopping Complex have recently drawn growing numbers of teens, now a key customer group, who come in groups to shop for decorations to personalize everything from pens and shoes to smartphones. "I like decorating my phone because it’s something I carry around all the time. When I look at my friends’ phones, they’re all different, from the colors they choose to how they arrange rhinestones, figurines and other decorations. It almost feels like you can tell their MBTI just by looking at their phones," said Lee Yu-ju, a 14-year-old middle school student from Hanam, Gyeonggi Province. Technology is bringing the same personalized experience into the classroom. In a recent study by researchers at Jeju National University involving 250 first-year middle school students, for instance, students learning about gravity and buoyancy used ChatGPT in science class to revisit questions they had answered incorrectly or concepts they did not fully understand. Rather than simply being given the correct answer, they interacted with the chatbot through prompts, using follow-up questions to check and expand their understanding. The researchers found that the approach supported question-driven learning, allowing students to work through concepts via their own interactions with the chatbot. "When I study history, I like using timelines, charts or diagrams to see how people are connected, and Gemini is really good at that. For English vocabulary, I remember words better when I study them through quizzes, so I often use ChatGPT because it’s the easiest to talk back and forth with," said Sim Ji-yong, a 16-year-old middle school student from Bundang, Gyeonggi Province. The rise of personalized learning has also brought greater attention to the diversity of the learning process itself, according to Do Jae-woo, a professor of education at Gongju National University of Education. “As technology has advanced, the quality of learning through digital platforms and content has improved, and most importantly, learning can now be tailored to individual students,” he said. Do stressed that such changes are also beginning to influence how schools are expected to evaluate student learning. Guidelines introduced by the Education Ministry and 17 local education offices last year, for example, put greater emphasis on how students use AI in assignments, rather than simply on the end result. For a writing assignment, students may be asked to record their prompts, explain why they accepted or rejected AI suggestions and verify AI-generated information, while the writing itself must be done without AI, officials said. When Alpha meets population cliff Technology may continue to open new possibilities for Generation Alpha, but in Korea, its members will come of age facing a far more daunting reality: a population cliff. According to Statistics Korea’s long-term population projections, the decline is expected to accelerate from around 2030, when the oldest Alphas, born in 2010, turn 20. Korea’s population, currently 51.6 million, is projected to fall to 51.31 million in 2030, dip below the 50 million mark in 2041 and shrink to just 36.22 million by 2072, data showed. The resulting labor shortage is expected to accelerate the adoption of physical AI, including humanoid robots, while a dwindling student population puts growing pressure on universities. Economists say Generation Alpha could help offset some of that labor shortage by driving productivity gains as it enters the workforce, drawing on its familiarity with AI and other digital technologies. “We are already seeing young people — some still in their teens — running online businesses, building apps and creating their own opportunities through social media and AI. Such cases will only become more common,” said Kim Sang-kyun, a professor at Kyung Hee University’s Graduate School of Business Administration. Signs of that shift are already visible. Of the 1.14 million businesses launched in Korea last year, 418,000, or 36.8 percent, were started by young entrepreneurs aged 39 or younger, according to the Korea Institute of Startup and Entrepreneurship Development. While startups declined 4 percent year-on-year, startups in technology-based industries bucked the trend, rising 2.8 percent to 221,000 during the same period. As technology expands individual capabilities, personal achievement could matter more than school or workplace affiliations, which have long carried social weight in Korea, Kim said. "Instead of school ties or workplace connections, Generation Alpha may form relationships more around shared interests, projects and what they want to accomplish together," he said. "The weakening of group-based identities could extend to the way people structure their lives. Generation Alpha may feel less bound by the conventional path of university, employment, marriage and family, choosing instead from a much wider range of possibilities." cjh@heraldcorp.com