Context · AI
AI sounds like a friend who knows everything, and for a kid who's still learning to question what they're told, all that confidence is really confusing.
Why this matters for your kid
When your kid uses ChatGPT, the answers sound like they came from a teacher or an older kid who really knows the subject, and a confident voice is the easiest thing in the world for a kid to trust. But AI is just copying what a confident expert would sound like. Even when it looks things up online, it can't reliably tell whether its own answer is right, and that's where kids get tripped up.
What your child experiences
It feels like asking a friend who's read everything and never once says "I don't know." It doesn't sigh, it doesn't look at the clock, and it doesn't make them feel dumb for asking the same thing a fourth time. Next to raising your hand in class, that's an easy thing to prefer.
What you might notice
The sign is a kid who pastes in an answer without reading it, or who ends an argument with "the AI said so" the way they used to say "my teacher said so." That's normal, because kids trust confident language. It just means it's time to show them how to check it.
The Sunday Script
Get one script every Sunday
The words for one hard conversation, in your inbox every Sunday, and a short note once a month. You can stop anytime.
That email doesn’t look right.