ZHEJIANG, East China — “Find the little girl,” Li Xiaoyi repeats for the third time, her finger on a cartoon avatar with wide eyes, a neat bob, and a faint, unreadable smile. “That’s for chatting.”
Around the classroom, students hunch over their phones, scrolling, tapping, squinting — searching for the face of Doubao, China’s most popular AI chatbot, built by ByteDance, the company behind TikTok.
In the second row, a woman in her 60s raises her hand. She wears glasses and always brings a bottle of grapefruit juice to class. “Teacher, my Doubao has no girl. Only three dots.”
“Try scrolling up,” Li says. A moment later: “Ah, there she is!”
Nearby, someone’s on mute. One has lost Wi-Fi. Another is still adjusting font size. Li and two other instructors move from row to row, repeating the same instructions in small variations.
This is AI class on a Monday afternoon in Huangyan, a district of Taizhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, best known for mold factories and citrus farms. Of its 702,000 residents, a fifth are over the age of 60 — the very people Li’s course is designed to reach.
“The Doubao interface feels a bit like WeChat — familiar, less intimidating,” says Li, referring to the ubiquitous Chinese messaging app. Her team, a handful of former journalists rooted in the city, shifted to elder tech education this spring. Since March, teaching AI to seniors has been their full-time focus.
Tucked inside a classroom at the local senior university, their course, “Make Friends with AI,” is still one of the few in China designed entirely for people born long before smartphones. Yet it’s also part of a slowly expanding wave of programs helping older adults make sense of the technology that now shapes their daily lives.
And it comes at a time when AI in China is becoming increasingly widespread — backed by state policy, integrated into major consumer platforms, and positioned as a strategic priority in the country’s push for technological self-reliance.
But for older adults, the shift can feel sudden and disorienting. “Unlike digital natives, it’s like teaching kindergarteners,” says Li. “You have to slow the pace, change the language, and treat every first AI encounter like it’s brand new.”
Joining the dots
Li always starts with font size. “Click the three dots first. Then look for ‘Font Adjustment,’” she says, guiding them step by step. “Left is smaller, right is larger. Pick what’s easiest to read.” “Raise your hand if you’ve finished adjusting,” she says, scanning the room with a smile.
Every lesson moves like this — slow, specific, and repetitive.
Even common tech terms don’t land. “Sometimes we worry that if we use overly technical language, 95% of the elderly won’t understand,” Li says. “‘Dialogue interface’ or ‘input box’ just draws blanks.”
So they translate. “The three dots” becomes shorthand for menus. “The little girl avatar” points to the chatbot icon. “Visual cues are more intuitive,” she explains.
In one lesson, she points to the screen: “Look at the top right corner — you’ll see a small speaker icon. If there’s a line through it, it means mute mode is on, so the little girl can’t talk to you right now.”
Each session revolves around simple, concrete tasks: asking the Doubao chatbot for recipes, planning a trip, health advice, or gardening tips. When someone gets stuck — a password glitch, a muted mic, a blocked camera — Li walks over, kneels down, and shows them where to tap.
The goal is to simply make AI feel usable. “Many elderly people don’t even know what AI is,” Li says. “Even if they’ve heard the term, it feels irrelevant. We show them how it fits into their daily life. And that’s when it starts to click.”
That’s also why Li centers her lessons on Doubao. Compared to other models, it’s built more like an app than a search engine — with buttons, avatars, and built-in guides. It looks like something they already know. It behaves like something they can grow into.
“Imagine you’re out sightseeing,” she says. “Just snap a photo of anything unfamiliar and ask the bot to explain it.”
“For those managing high blood pressure or diabetes,” she continues, “try asking about meal suggestions.”
“And if you’re feeling lonely or stressed,” she adds, “it’s like making a WeChat call to a virtual friend — or even a psychologist.”
By the final weeks, she nudges students to explore more playful features: from chatting with historical figures to building a personal avatar. “You’ll be showing it off on social media,” she tells them, grinning.
One student, 68-year-old Li Ming, began the course needing help just to log in. Now he’s making AI-generated postcards from his old travel photos and posting them to social media.
Another, Wang Ping, a 76-year-old retired nurse who has traveled to 37 countries, has started adding animated penguins into her videos of Antarctica. She gave Li a photo album filled with AI-enhanced scenes. “You made me feel 50 again,” she messaged later.
Class of ’25
The idea began over Spring Festival dinner earlier this year. From primetime news anchors to family WeChat groups, AI chatbots were suddenly everywhere.
At the table, Li’s 95-year-old grandfather Xia Caizeng, a retired teacher, turned to her suddenly and said, “Install this for me,” pointing to Doubao.
She did, and to her surprise, he quickly grasped the basics. His first question was simple: directions to the city’s cultural center. The second came a few minutes later. “Search for Li Qinlian,” he said — referring to his wife, whose information was saved on his phone.
Weeks later, he was still using the app. “Sometimes Grandpa sends me the images he makes,” Li says. “He still writes poems by hand, but he enjoys asking questions, generating pictures, looking things up.”
That’s when Li realized the tool had real potential. “Older users actually enjoy it, and it’s truly useful to them.”
Just over a month later, what started at her family table became a full-time project. Li joined forces with a few former colleagues from the Huangyan Media Center — one of whom had led government-backed documentary projects. They called themselves “Little Cozy Jacket,” a nod to the Chinese term for a daughter who keeps you warm in winter.
More than 40 people signed up for the first round.
In the beginning, the project was mostly practical. But as the weeks progressed, the lessons went beyond just AI. “My students made me reflect on how I treat my own mother,” says Li. “She told me she could feel the difference. I’m trying to control my temper more.”
The classroom dynamic changed, too. “It’s not exactly a teacher-student relationship, and not quite just friendship,” Li says. “It’s more like a peer connection, something softer, more equal.”
After one class, a woman mentioned she was struggling with dry eyes. “I’d had the same issue before, so I quietly recommended some medicine,” Li says. “At that moment, she didn’t feel like a student. More like an elder, or a friend.”
To avoid reinforcing age barriers, Li makes a point never to call her students “old people” or “seniors.” Instead, she uses familiar, respectful terms like “uncle” and “auntie,” small gestures that help create a warmer, more equal space for learning.
Yet building something lasting has been far harder. After a free trial class, advanced sessions were priced at 199 yuan ($27). In their first round, only 18 students signed up — far short of what a five-person team needs to break even.
Even that modest fee proved a major barrier. Nearly 80% of interested students chose not to continue. “This was something we didn’t expect,” Li says. Those who do return tend to have both time and a stable retirement income.
By contrast, government-subsidized senior classes usually cost just 200 yuan for an entire semester. Against that baseline, a per-session AI course feels expensive — and hard to justify.
The local senior university provides classroom space, but no funding. “Without our media salaries, this wouldn’t last a month,” Li says.
To stay afloat, the team has branched out beyond the classroom. They’ve started producing short-form videos for social media, showcasing real lessons, role-plays of everyday AI use, and clips created using AI tools. They’ve also partnered with local committees and companies to run community workshops.
Huang Chuan, a digital marketing specialist on the team, says the curriculum was never meant to scale quickly.
“You can’t apply a one-size-fits-all model to older users,” Huang explains. “In a city like Shanghai, you’d need different examples: How do you use AI while having coffee? Or while traveling abroad? The context has to fit their lives.”
For now, the focus is solely on this district and a specific demographic, not nationwide expansion. “If we had to bring it somewhere else, we’d have to build a new product from scratch,” he says.
Still, Huang sees potential in Huangyan, his hometown.
“I left in 2015. It was hard to find like-minded people. The mobile internet scene was weak. But AI has changed everything. It flattened the playing field. Whether you’re in Beijing, Shanghai, or Huangyan, everyone’s almost at the same starting line.”
Keeping pace
Back in the classroom, confusion is a daily part of instruction.
Some students arrive with no mobile data, a drained battery, or are stuck on a password screen. Others accidentally tap “Don’t Allow” when installing apps, blocking key features like image recognition — problems that send Li’s team back into phone settings, fixing permissions by hand.
“Teaching these ‘senior kids’ takes time,” Li adds. “Most of the time, it’s not that they don’t want to learn — they just forget things. And that’s okay.”
But the real challenge is keeping up with how fast the technology changes.
Even after days of practice, a single update can throw everything off. For older users still getting their bearings, every tweak from a product team becomes a new hurdle. “Product managers probably have no idea how much extra work each version brings us,” Li says.
Take Doubao. Over just a few months, Li’s team has tracked at least three different interface versions. The core functions stay the same, but layouts, icons, and button paths shift just enough to derail a lesson.
Even different Android models can behave differently. “Just yesterday, another new version rolled out,” Li says. “We lost a lot of time because more than two versions were in use in the same classroom.”
The changes force instructors to constantly adjust on the fly.
If a student can’t find a button, Li breaks it down visually: “If you don’t see the three dots, look at the image below. Tap the little arrow in the upper left to go back, then head to ‘Mine’ — the head-shaped icon. From there, hit the gear in the top right corner, and you’ll see ‘Font Size Adjustment,’” she tells them.
It’s exhausting work, and Li knows the pace won’t let up anytime soon. Each week brings a new app version, a new glitch, a new surprise. “For now,” she says, “we can only rely on the dumb method: slow things down, extend class time, or shrink the number of students per session.”
Even then, lessons rarely go according to plan. Students jump ahead, tap the wrong icon, panic when the screen doesn’t match. “Many don’t care what version they’re on, they just follow their own rhythm,” says Li. “We have to keep reminding them: ‘Please look at my screen first. Are you on the same version as I am?’”
But just as often, they catch her off guard. One of the most engaged students — a well-traveled auntie who loves experimenting with new tech — once asked if the chatbot could tell fortunes. Li laughed. “That’s not part of the official course,” she said. “But add me on WeChat — I’ll send you a template.”
It also reminded her why she keeps showing up.
“To be honest, I’m in my 30s now, and I do feel a sense of urgency,” Li says. “One day, I’ll grow old too. I just hope that by doing more meaningful work now, there will be people willing and able to communicate with me when I’m in my 70s or 80s.”
Editor: Apurva.
(Header image: Li Xiaoyi teaches older adults how to log in to AI apps during a class in Taizhou, Zhejiang province, May 26, 2025. Chen Yiru/Sixth Tone)