{"id":7765,"date":"2026-08-13T10:00:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/2026\/08\/13\/how-kids-feel-about-ai-in-their-own-words\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T10:00:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T10:00:29","slug":"how-kids-feel-about-ai-in-their-own-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/2026\/08\/13\/how-kids-feel-about-ai-in-their-own-words\/","title":{"rendered":"How kids feel about AI, in their own words"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we\u2019d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were using it. We were also listening for concerns that were less kid-specific, like deepfakes or job destruction. But what we actually heard when we asked kids aged 10 to 18 about AI had tons of nuance. <\/p>\n

Many of the same kids who can go on and on about music, rock climbing, or soccer met our questions with words like \u201cbruh\u201d and \u201cmeh\u201d\u2014or were so deeply against AI or uninterested in making it part of their lives that they didn\u2019t want to talk about it at all. One teen said his peers use it for things they know they shouldn\u2019t, like writing papers. One told us she won\u2019t touch AI because of the environmental impact. A few said they find the whole field disheartening: \u201cAI isn\u2019t the solution to our problems,\u201d said Winter, a 17-year-old. \u201cI\u2019m afraid it\u2019s going to be the end of creativity and critical thinking.\u201d Yet most of the kids we asked admitted to using AI at least a little bit.<\/p>\n

AI doesn\u2019t yet seem to be something a lot of elementary- or middle-school-age kids we spoke to are focused on\u2014and they aren\u2019t begging for it, the way they do for iPhones and Snapchat accounts. Many told us that some of their first AI encounters came from their parents or schools. Sometimes, they said, it\u2019s just embedded in the devices and apps they already rely on. It\u2019s just there, in things like a Google search. <\/p>\n

What we heard tracks with the data. In a survey published in February 2026<\/a>, the Pew Research Center found that 57% of teens in the US had used chatbots to search for information, 54% tapped them to help with schoolwork, and 47% had used them for fun or entertainment. Only 12% had used them for emotional support or advice. Teens are over four times more likely to be using AI in innocuous ways than potentially harmful ones. Some are even using it to build things, whether it\u2019s a character, a tech platform, or a tutor to help other kids study.<\/p>\n

None of that means the worries are misplaced. Kids can stumble into unfiltered content, lean on a chatbot instead of their own judgment, or trust an answer that\u2019s wrong\u2014and they should be protected from those dangers. But the danger is the reason to teach the thing, not to avoid it. We don\u2019t teach teens to never drive. We teach them to check their blind spots.<\/p>\n

What surprised us most was how much young people might be able to teach adults about AI, and how clearly the kids who use it could name what they will and won\u2019t hand over. They\u2019re not as worried that it will take their jobs as they are that it might impact society. And, with increasing access to tools that could in theory do their thinking, their talking, or even their friend-\u00admaking for them, it sounds as if most want to keep their hands on the wheel.<\/p>\n

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n

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JUSTYNA STASIK<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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The Coder<\/h3>\n

Remy, 16, New York<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The word that comes to mind when I think about AI is \u201cindifferent.\u201d I just don\u2019t find the current applications that exciting for my own use. I go to school. I teach tae kwon do. I read. I play games with friends. None of that needs AI. I mean, I use it. I mostly use Claude, the free version, for programming outside of school. I had it help me write a program to see if I could tweak my computer\u2019s overclock. So I see the appeal. <\/p>\n

But at school, I actually think AI mostly makes my assignments worse, not better. In English, everything is now in-class writing, because teachers don\u2019t want kids cheating. So we have only 70 minutes to write a whole essay, and I think that hinders my writing. (Did you know Princeton voted to let faculty proctor exams for the first time in over a century? Their honor code goes back to 1893, and now it\u2019s over because of AI.)<\/p>\n

As far as code goes, I\u2019d also rather build things myself. I\u2019ve been making a reinforcement-learning model in a game engine with a friend; it moves randomly at first, gets rewarded for walking toward a coin, and after enough iterations it teaches itself the most efficient path. I\u2019ve also tested AI for game development, and it isn\u2019t there. It makes sloppy code, and it\u2019s bad at blending mechanics into something cohesive. I\u2019d spend more time correcting it than writing it myself.<\/p>\n

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I think AI right now is sort of like the first car or the first airplane. It\u2019s interesting but crude. It\u2019s obviously an amazing invention but not actually good yet.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Overall, I think AI right now is sort of like the first car or the first airplane. It\u2019s interesting but crude. It\u2019s obviously an amazing invention but not actually good yet. It\u2019ll get somewhere. One thing I read about was AI flagging breast cancer more accurately, trained to catch its own false positives so a human still verifies. That\u2019s the version I care about.<\/p>\n

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The Organizer <\/h3>\n

Danielle, 18, California<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I\u2019m studying engineering, and my life goal is to innovate technology that will help as many people as I can. The way I see it, AI isn\u2019t inherently good or bad; that\u2019s decided by the people using it. It\u2019s already being used for lots of good. Just think about how it helps people with personalized education and more accessible medical diagnoses.<\/p>\n

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PING ZHU<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

So far, the biggest project I\u2019ve worked on with AI is called Next Voters<\/a>. My teammates are more on the technical side, and I\u2019m working on scaling. Right now, we\u2019re focusing mostly on city councils as well as states. Our system turns dense, hundred-page documents into a headline and a few plain-language bullet points in your inbox. And everything is cited, so you can click straight to the actual policy to learn more. The information comes to you, instead of you having to remember to go search or prompt for it. <\/p>\n

One AI agent finds official government sources for a given city or state\u2014<\/em>the council website, the proposed bills, the meeting transcripts. Another verifies they\u2019re real and credible; another scrapes them every week for the latest updates; another sorts them into categories like civil rights, immigration, and economics; and the last one writes our weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

The project\u2019s goal is to reduce the barriers to democratic participation\u2014<\/em>to make sure anyone, regardless of race, gender, income, or education level, has an easy way to get the information they need and then think critically about how they want to use it. We made it because right now, it feels as if most teens aren\u2019t very engaged. I was in English class when the war in Ukraine came up and someone said, \u201cThere\u2019s a war going on?\u201d That gap, plus all the emotionally charged social media misinformation that gets promoted because it earns the most clicks, makes me nervous for the next generation of voters.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t want AI to think for people; we want to use it to disperse knowledge. In other words, we want to deal people the cards and let them play them however they want, but we have to make sure they have the cards in the first place. <\/p>\n

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The Cringe-o-meter<\/h2>\n

We asked kids to rate a range of AI uses from totally fine to not okay.<\/h4>\n
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CHRIS PIASCIK<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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The Naturalist <\/h3>\n

Hazel, 17, New York<\/strong><\/h5>\n

When ChatGPT first came out, my dad showed it to me and it seemed fun. But as it got more prominent and seemed to be everywhere, I started to feel uneasy. Then I learned about the environmental impact.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a rock climber and I hike a lot. It\u2019s good because when I\u2019m on a wall, I\u2019m just focused on staying on that wall. I\u2019m not thinking about my phone or anything else. That\u2019s why I love it. I also love the views and being around animals\u2014<\/em>even insects. I want to be an ecologist, and the more time I spend in nature, the more I want to protect those wild spaces.<\/p>\n

The part that bothers me most about AI is the data centers that companies are building to enable it. They house these huge blocks of servers that use enormous amounts of water. They take it from local towns and don\u2019t leave enough behind for the people who actually live there. And when they get big enough, they put off so much heat they can raise the local temperature a degree or two.<\/p>\n

So I make small choices. When AI pops up somewhere, I just don\u2019t engage with it. It can feel isolating when everyone around me is using it, but I don\u2019t want AI to be the thing that kills the places I love.<\/p>\n

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PING ZHU<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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The Storyteller<\/h3>\n

Wesley, 14, Ohio<\/strong><\/h5>\n

My friends and I have all heard about AI and seen videos made by AI, but I mostly use it for school. I wrote a short story and ran it through ChatGPT to catch my grammar and spelling errors, and I used it to debug a little game I\u2019d coded for a project. What I worry about is it robbing us of our ability to think creatively, or to think for ourselves.<\/p>\n

But I have tried using AI for fun. When I was bored, I tried to have a conversation with ChatGPT once or twice, but I didn\u2019t really like it. Character.AI is more fun. You type in all this information, give it a bunch of prompts and a profile picture, and then you can post your AI character for anyone to use. You just put what you\u2019ve made out there. Then you talk to it. My favorite show is One Piece<\/em> on Netflix, so I threw myself onto its pirate crew using a character I found. <\/p>\n

Other people have used Character.AI to build whole games. There\u2019s a rap-star simulator where you pick your difficulty and where you\u2019re from, and the AI creates a game out of that. There are also World War II simulators, and chats where you\u2019re working with assassins from a TV show. You can find pretty much anything.<\/p>\n

I guess I\u2019d recommend it, but with caution. The content is pretty unfiltered, so you have to be careful what you click on. You learn its limits fast, too. On the free version the memory runs out: Get far enough into a chat and it slows down and forgets what happened. It\u2019s like everything else with AI. If you trust it to run on its own, it falls apart. You have to keep steering it where you want it to go. <\/p>\n

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I guess I\u2019d recommend it, but with caution. The content is pretty unfiltered, so you have to be careful what you click on. You learn its limits fast, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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JUSTYNA STASIK<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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The Artist <\/h3>\n

Sylvia, 10, Michigan<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I haven\u2019t used tools like ChatGPT or Claude myself, but my mom does. I really like to draw and write songs, but I don\u2019t use AI for that. I don\u2019t really have big feelings about AI either way. It\u2019s a little like a calculator. A calculator does the math for you, and AI does other things for you. But I don\u2019t like when AI tricks you, like when my mom found some songs she liked on Spotify and then looked up the artist to see what they looked like. It turns out the whole thing was made by AI. I was surprised, even though I still like the song.<\/p>\n

I do use AI at school, through a program called SchoolAI. Mostly I put my writing in and it gives me ideas or helps me revise. You can\u2019t have it just write for you, but you can use it to help. When I\u2019m older I want to be an artist, or maybe a librarian. I\u2019d probably use some technology either way. But the drawing and the songwriting? Those I want to keep doing myself. <\/p>\n

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The Cringe-o-meter (continued)<\/h2>\n

We asked kids to rate a range of AI uses from totally fine to not okay.<\/h4>\n
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PING ZHU<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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The Pre-Premed <\/h3>\n

Evelyn, 13, Oregon<\/strong><\/h5>\n

In January, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and that\u2019s when AI became a bigger part of my life. Now when we\u2019re cooking, we can run a recipe through ChatGPT, tell it the serving size, and it works out how many carbs there are. We use AI like that a lot.<\/p>\n

My glucose monitor and my insulin pump also talk to each other using their own kind of AI to predict dosing. The monitor tracks what my blood sugar actually is, and the pump does the math. So if it predicts that my blood sugar will be high in 30 minutes, it gives me a correction dose, and if it predicts I\u2019m about to go low, it stops the insulin before that happens. When I was first diagnosed I was still doing shots, and I went low almost every night. It was really stressful. Now the pump can catch it, and at night my phone goes off if I drop, so I wake up and drink juice. Mostly, I just get to sleep more because of it.<\/p>\n

But the hardest part of having diabetes isn\u2019t something I can use AI for. It\u2019s remembering to carry all my supplies everywhere\u2014to school, to a long day of anything.<\/p>\n

I do use AI for school sometimes. Memory tricks when I\u2019m studying for a test, ideas to get a project started. It\u2019s a really good tool for that. But I don\u2019t know exactly how I\u2019ll use AI in the future. I want to be an endocrinologist someday, so I figure something will come up, since I\u2019m already using it to help with my diabetes. I know other people worry that AI is going to take over the world. I don\u2019t really think so. I still think we\u2019re in control of it, and I think the benefits outweigh the risks.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t know how exactly I\u2019ll use AI in the future. I want to be an endocrinologist someday, so I figure something will come up, since I\u2019m already using it to help with my diabetes.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The Inventor<\/h3>\n

Krishiv, 17, Ontario, Canada<\/strong><\/h5>\n

When I was growing up, I always liked building things: Lego builds, Minecraft worlds, and then video games in Scratch. I\u2019d make a little game, post it for other kids to play, read the comments, and make it better. Then, when I started high school, I had to spend way more time studying than I ever had, and honestly I just wanted to build things. So I went looking for ways to get good grades while studying less. Khan Academy had an AI tutor in the works, but it was stuck behind a waitlist, so I figured, why not build my own? <\/p>\n

After months of launching random stuff, I created an AI tutor called Aceflow. You could feed it anything a teacher assigned\u2014<\/em>a 30-minute lecture video on YouTube, a blog post, a PDF of the textbook or presentation slides\u2014<\/em>and it would spin up endless practice questions, with a tutor on the side that explained things the way my teacher did. I built it just for myself, showed it to my friends, then put it on TikTok. It got tons of views on TikTok and thousands of users.<\/p>\n

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JUSTYNA STASIK<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Was I worried people would call it cheating? Not really. I knew how to defend it: A tool like this isn\u2019t so different from well-off families hiring expensive private tutors, except everyone gets one. That part mattered to me. Back in eighth grade, a teacher had me run a little computer science class for about 30 kids with special needs, and once they got personalized attention, they were building games nobody expected of them. That convinced me that kids are capable of so much more than people think, and AI can help scale that level of personalized attention to everyone. That unlocks so much potential.<\/p>\n

That first AI tutoring project ended up helping me land part-time roles at BenchSci (one of Canada\u2019s biggest AI companies) and Simple Ventures (a venture firm). More recently, I joined an AI lab at MIT; co-instructed an AI agents course with an MIT professor; and launched CheetahPrep.com<\/a>, an SAT prep platform that uses AI to adapt to each student.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m generally optimistic about how AI will impact humanity, but when other kids\u2019 first reaction is fear, I think that\u2019s an important sign too. It\u2019s a reminder that we should be excited about the future while still being mindful of the risks, working together to make AI work for humanity.<\/p>\n

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Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara are the founding editors of <\/em>Anyway<\/a>, an independent print magazine for tweens and teens.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we\u2019d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-7765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mit-feed","tag-mit-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}