Sounds like healthy skepticism to me. Assume nothing has changed until proven otherwise.
AI has changed some things, and will change some more. Pretending otherwise isn't healthy skepticism, it's hiding your head in the sand.
The real question is, which things does it change, and how much? Don't assume a discontinuous change without enough evidence, but there is enough evidence that something has changed.
Of course, something has changed - every invention changes something, that is almost a tautology. However, is there any evidence that the change is negative and drastic enough to warrant my attention and time of day? I think not.
So I would say that there seems to have always been a segment of the population on whom political memes were effective - probably more effective than longer discourse.
Now, you could argue that more people are in that camp today. I can't argue with that; I don't have any data one way or the other. But I would at least suggest the alternate possibility that it's more visible today that people are in that camp.
At least with the phones those students might well be learning something, or at least getting some reading practice. Even in the most pessimal case it's not useless. When I was at school there were still teachers whose entire teaching methodology was writing out notes and diagrams on a rolling blackboard, and we copied them onto paper. Literally just human photocopiers! You think we were engaged? No chance. I remember about three facts from years of being in those classes, and those facts are useless. Even scrolling Instagram would have been 10x more educational!
But with multi channel multi modal AI you can have conversations. If you do that a lot you might get it that you dont gaveto be polite, or say sorry or even admit your own mistakes. The current AI does not care about those. But people (the current ones) do care.
Not saying this change is bad or good, but I also dont think there will be no change in how we interact with each other.