How Are We Supposed to Talk to Our Kids About AI?

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I guess it’s high time that we asked ChatGPT how to talk to our kids about AI. I’m kidding! The dull composites that generative AI tries to pass off as “ideas” are definitionally average, and since reading Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, the looming real-world ravages of AI infrastructure are no longer abstract to me — they’re unignorable. As Tressie McMillan Cottom put it back in March, “It is precisely because I use new technology that I know mid when I see it.” So yeah — I’m not that interested.

My own feelings about using generative AI aside — no, I don’t agree that it’s “fun to use,” grow up! — let’s not make the same mistake we made the last time we were faced with figuring out how to approach a world-transforming technology that its developers insisted was inevitable and also totally awesome. Twenty years ago, we adopted social media with the degree of critical thinking that a toddler applies to putting a LEGO in their mouth. We shared things we shouldn’t have and eagerly accepted our feeds as a stand-in for reality. Later, when it came time for young people to create their own accounts, adults abdicated all responsibility for modeling smart behavior. We let kids do whatever they wanted on social media, on the correct assumption that we didn’t have enough credibility left to establish any controls.

You may recall that there was a time that many adults thought young kids should use iPads because it would give them a competitive advantage in a screen-based workplace. So embarrassing. We shit the bed and kids are paying the price. It feels like we’re on the verge of doing it again. What if we didn’t?

If accountants and movie producers find useful ways to apply AI to their work, I hope people in those fields debate its use first. But my beat is what goes on at home, and what I see is most of the people I know socially, and many of my colleagues in academia, using ChatGPT and other generative-AI apps on a very regular basis. Suddenly people I usually trust are earnestly trying to convince me that I need it. To help me figure out how to be the adult in my own home, I contacted people who have done extensive research on the current and future impact of generative AI, and I asked them how they would talk to kids about it.

Emily Bender, a linguist who co-authored The AI Con with the sociologist Alex Hanna, reminded me that when we talk about AI, we need to be precise. Many tools that use AI — voice-to-text transcription tools, or tools that will turn a set of text into a study-aid podcast, for example — are not generating something new; they are combining a single individual’s inputs and making them legible in a new format. What Bender is most critical of is what she calls “synthetic media machines” — models that create composite imagery and writing, like ChatGPT, DALL-E3, and Midjourney, using massive libraries of existing material to fulfill a prompt.

“These tools are designed to look like objective, all-knowing systems, and I think it’s important to get kids used to asking, ‘Who are the people who built this? Who said and wrote the original things that became the training data? Whose artwork was stolen by these companies to produce the training sets?’” said Bender.

For kids too young to connect with those questions, Bender suggests parents focus on the environmental impact. “Every time you use a chatbot, you’re helping to build the case for the company to develop the next model and build the next data center. Data centers have to be cooled with massive amounts of clean water, and clean water usually means drinking water.” Whose drinking water will be diverted?

Karen Hao echoed Bender’s advice: “Parents should not express to their kids that this is inevitable. It’s fully a decision that they can inform themselves in making about how best to integrate these tools into your life, and maybe the right answer is that they don’t want to use them at all.”

But what about college kids, who could hypothetically use AI for every aspect of their schooling and are surrounded by peers doing exactly that? One of my most persistent worries is the effect that generative AI might have on cognitive capacity among young people. I worry about the emergence of an intellectual inequality gap that will become even more deeply entrenched than income inequality. I worry that if some kids are kept reliant on generative tech for completing everyday tasks, they’ll grow up to be less capable of resistance, less sure of themselves, and easier to exploit.

Maybe we’ll get through to college-age kids by appealing to their competitive instincts. “The best way to guarantee job security and general quality of life in the future is to figure out your strengths and where you’re unique,” said Hao. “Ultimately, companies aren’t looking to see if you can use a tool or not. They are looking for something irreplaceable about you that they can’t just swap in for another candidate. If you’re going to overly rely on AI, which is literally based on statistical sameness, you are going to shoot yourself in the foot. You will shortchange your ability to find what your strengths are, and that’s what college is for — dabbling, trying things out. Some kids rely on chatbots to make life decisions, to figure out how to respond in certain situations, and they’re getting the statistical average, always. It makes you look like everybody else. Your using AI is not going to be perceived as clever. You’re never going to stand out.”

And as far as the idea that students need to “learn the tools” to be ready to use them effectively in the workplace? That is a joke. Beyond the bare fact that these tools are designed for ease of use above all else, they are constantly changing. Using them now will not help you use them in the future.

Although Empire of AI focuses on how tech companies are accumulating the same kinds of power once only wielded by imperial governments, Hao told me that our strongest resistance starts at home, where we should encourage kids’ independence in the outside world. “Kids feel that their phones and these tools are a really free space where they are unsupervised. Whereas when they hang out in person, they are so often chaperoned and watched. So even though they might prefer to socialize in person, they would rather have the freedom that comes from being online.” If parents can give their kids that feeling of freedom in their social environments, it could provide a valuable alternative to the lure of the always-on AI companion.

“We’re seeing evidence that long-term use of these tools can lead to decline in mental health,” she continued. “For parents who are concerned about that, the solution is to just continue being in tune with your kids. Continue being emotionally supportive. Kids or adults ultimately start using these tools when they’re not finding that support elsewhere. The solution is not always about figuring out how kids should be relating to AI.”

And as for ourselves, bearers of the responsibility for modeling thoughtful behavior in a world being manipulated and overtaken by people we wouldn’t trust to babysit our kids for half an hour? Let’s just remember the point of all this — of caring for people, of caring about the world. We all know, very intimately, that only a fool expects everything to be easy. Our relationship to information should be no different. Emily Bender reminded me that the valorization of convenience, of frictionlessness, comes at a very steep cost to our humanity. “The idealized world that people selling this tech are selling is that you can have any information at your fingertips. But the friction is the whole point.”

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