Ask an adult what they think about kids and AI, and expect to hear a strong opinion. Parents, politicians, experts—everyone has a take on whether young people should use AI, how to moderate their exposure, and how it’s changing the ways they think and communicate.
Many of these opinions revolve around education. Adults fret that kids will turn ChatGPT into a research bot, paper writer, or math problem solver. Teachers, specifically, struggle to know how to deal with policing student use, and how to include it in their own pedagogy. According to a 2024 Pew survey, a quarter of public school teachers think the technology does more harm than good; many more are on the fence. A later survey found 26 percent of US teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork—double the number from 2023.
But kids’ exposure to AI stretches far beyond education. Some use it for companionship, others for advice. So what do they actually think about the technology? WIRED talked to six young people across the US about their thoughts on AI—and how it’s changing their worlds.
These comments have been edited for length and clarity.
AI Can Help You Study—but Be Nice
I don’t like to just ask AI a question and get an answer right away, because teachers say that’s cheating. A lot of times, I like asking it to find me sources. Like, during our Haitian revolution block in history, I’d ask, “Give me five primary sources on the Haitian revolution.” Then I would have to get a little specific, because it’d give me links to books to buy, too.
Last year, for the biology test at the end of the year, what I did was copy-pasted the study guide that my teacher had given us into ChatGPT and had it ask me 100 questions about it. When you’re studying, that works, but in the moment, when you’re on the computer taking a test and you’re asking AI questions from testing, that’s cheating.
The only time I use it outside of school is for recipes, like for baking. Although sometimes I see videos that are AI that seem so real. I feel like that’s the scariest part of AI, that it can make anyone sound like they’re saying anything. The better it gets, the more believable it is, and the more dangerous it is.
I always say please and thank you when I use ChatGPT, just in case. If they take over the world, and they’re destroying everyone, then maybe they’ll be like, this guy says please and thank you. — Leo Schodorf, 15, Los Angeles
AI Is Terrible at Writing Essays
AI makes my day-to-day life as a student way easier, because it makes tasks a lot faster. If I want to create a to-do list, or if I’m studying for a test and I don’t have time, I can just put all my study materials into Gemini or ChatGPT and tell it to make me a study guide, to condense that information so I can get through it faster.
Honestly, it’s not really good for writing essays, because it’s extremely obvious that AI is doing your work for you. But in terms of reading things or getting ideas, AI is really good for that.
If you try to get AI to do all your work, it’s definitely detrimental, because then you lose your skills to write and read. It can make students more lazy. But that’s your loss, if you’re using it to cheat on your work.
I feel like nowadays AI gets portrayed in a very bad light, like it’s taking away everyone’s job and doing peoples’ work for them. But I feel like people aren’t realizing that the AI is what you train it on. We’re the ones creating technology, right? There are so many ways that we could solve problems with AI, as long as you use it for the right things. If you want to do good in this world, then you should be able to use a new technology in a good way that would benefit everyone.
Where I live in Colorado, we have a lot of wildlife vehicle collisions. So a couple years ago, I decided to try making a tool to help solve the problem. I brought the idea to my computer science teacher and some other students, and I ended up building a device that could detect deer, that you can put on your car. In our case, AI was really useful, because all we had to do was feed data into the model: I ran hundreds of thermal video frames through a computer vision model to recognize deer and other large wildlife, which trained our device to do real-time detection on the road without us having to manually analyze hours of footage. That’s the power of AI. — Siddhi Singh, 17, Highlands Ranch, Colorado
AI Is Bad for the Environment—and Turning Us Into Robots
I first heard about AI in middle school, when Snapchat added it to the chat messages feature. At first, I was like, wow, cool, this can probably make my life a whole lot easier. I started to use it for simple questions to help with my homework.
Now, I don’t use it at all. It’s very looked down upon by teachers and students at my school. If you get caught using AI or ChatGPT, you get kicked out of school.
I do feel like AI is infiltrating everything. My older sister uses ChatGPT, but I want her to stop using it, because it does so much harm to the environment. My younger sister uses AI to reply to text messages. That’s just a little glimpse as to what the future could look like, and it’s kind of scary, because that’s not normal.
Social media has already taken over peoples’ personalities, and AI speeds up that process. If you ask AI how to respond to a message, and it gives you an automated response, that’s going to impact the way you think you should respond to people. Eventually, when you use the advice of a robot, you become a robot. — Mahawa Kaba, 15, the Bronx, New York
Kids Are Going to Use AI, So Teach Them How
I go to an AI-themed high school, where AI is integrated into our classes, like through data science and programming. The teachers actually taught us how to use it first, and then let us use it. The biggest thing is to ask ourselves: Why am I using AI right now? Am I using it to make my work better? Am I using it because I’m just too lazy to do it?
Basically, you’re supposed to use AI to cut down on monotonous tasks that you don’t need to be doing yourself. From there, you bring back that human innovation and originality.
My first true experience with AI was in my AP human geography class, when we were looking at one of the blizzards that happened in Atlanta in the 2000s. We were looking at the data of how people were able to get home, so it was a lot of big data—thousands and thousands of numbers. So we used an AI program to split and compartmentalize those numbers, and then we were able to use our critical thinking to understand what the best resources are, and if something like that were to happen again, how governments should react.
Now, I take a lot of AP classes, and I use AI to streamline my studying. Like Quizlet gives you adaptive practice questions, based on what you get right and wrong. I also use Notion AI as my calendar app and for notes. It’ll scan through all my notes and tell me what page has the answers to a certain question. In May, when I start to study for AP exams, I use that.
I’m a night person—that’s when I study—and I can’t call my teacher at 3 am and ask them to explain something to me. But I can ask Copilot, or Photomath, and it will help me walk it through. I can ask, “Hey, can you explain that one more time?” when I might not feel as comfortable doing that in a classroom.
I feel like in a lot of schools, teachers tell students not to use it. But my generation is very resourceful. If we have the slightest access to something, we’re going to figure out how to use it. Teachers should treat it like anything else: Before you give a kid a bike, or a phone, or internet access, it’s best to just teach them how to use it first. —Gabrielle Watkins, 16, Buford, Georgia
You Can’t Enjoy Making Art If AI Does It for You
As someone that really likes to learn, I’m not a fan of AI, and I’m nervous about how it’s going to be used in the future. Like I’ve seen kids at my school use Grammarly to write essays for them, or use AI to figure out problems for their homework.
I think I was introduced to AI in fifth grade, so I remember a time back when AI was not a thing at all. But my brother is starting seventh grade, and people in his class just put in a math equation and AI solves it for them. It’s crazy how younger groups of people are being influenced by it so quickly.
I’m a visual artist, so hearing how people are using AI to create instant art and music makes me nervous for the future. It took me a while to be able to sketch a face, and it’s crazy to think that people can press a button and all of a sudden, they have the same thing. I wouldn’t feel satisfied if I just typed and it made art for me. The process of thinking it through, feeling like, “my hand hurts but I’m close to finishing”—you can’t enjoy that process if you just use AI to make it for you. —Nora Pai, 14, Manhattan
AI Could’ve Created Utopia, but Capitalism Got in the Way
I first learned about AI from that video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. That video was really bad, but I thought that AI was really cool and would be used for good purposes. But recently something that I’ve thought is how fast it’s been updating. Like in just a few years, it’s nearly identical to real videos. It can be used for a lot of bad things and can have a bunch of negative consequences. At the point where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake, there’s a bunch of openings for dangerous people to do dangerous stuff and get away with it.
Something that I’ve thought about is how in most portrayals of AI before it was really good, AI would be the one doing the jobs and making the world run, while humans would be the ones making art. But now that AI is actually being used, it’s quite the opposite. People are using AI to do stuff that they don’t have the patience for, like create art. I think that a lot of movies show one of two outcomes for AI: either one like what’s happening now, where it’s being used to fake stuff and isn’t doing that much to make the world work [better], or one where AI creates a utopia where everything is working fine because of it. That’s how AI should be used. But a bunch of other people thought that this would make a bunch more money, so this is what AI now is. —Finn King, 12, Jacksonville, Alabama
