How to Talk to Your Kids and Grandkids About AI

“The thing that feels the most daunting to parents is learning about it, trying it and having to step out of your comfort zone,” says Jasmine Hood Miller, director of community content and engagement at Common Sense Media in Philadelphia. The nonprofit advocacy group for families is headquartered in San Francisco.

Common Sense has just launched an AI nutrition label and rating scale it says is designed to assess the ethical use, transparency, safety and impact of AI products. So far Bard and ChatGPT have been issued three out of five stars.

2. Discover AI together

Experiment with your kids. Try different prompts.

Remind them that exchanging messages with an AI bot can seem like you’re engaging with a person, but no human being is at the other end of an AI conversation. Explain the risks associated with AI exchanges — the possibility of misinformation, potential for plagiarism and lack of privacy — and that everything needs to be verified.

AIs may deliver answers that sound authoritative or plausible but are just plain wrong, what the tech industry calls “hallucinations.”

“These tools are unreliable,” says Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in California. “We’re already seeing what happens to lawyers that ask ChatGPT to write a brief in a case. It literally makes up citations and facts that don’t exist.”

3. Check for school regulations

Just as adults should consult bosses about acceptable office use of AI, see what policies your kid’s school has around AI.

Even in the absence of fully baked rules, “someone already is thinking about it,” Miller says. If in doubt, ask your child’s teachers to weigh in on what’s proper.

4. Don’t cheat. It’s morally wrong

“Plagiarism and cheating [are] a human issue. That’s not a technology issue,” says Jenny Maxwell, head of Grammarly for Education. The Grammarly writing tool — free and fee-based versions are available — can change a writer’s tone, supply real-time feedback, provide citations and help students brainstorm ideas.

The San Francisco company has partnerships with more than 3,000 educational institutions. It recently launched generative AI features that Grammarly officials say will augment, not replace, a student’s critical thinking skills.

Cheating robs a student’s opportunity to learn, says Michael Steven Marx, an associate professor of English and the director of expository writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Sure, ChatGPT can correct simple errors in a school paper.

“But it’s like a free lunch, and we know there’s no free lunch,” he says. “It’s going to come back to haunt you. You’re going to be sitting somewhere [and] have to write something, and you still don’t know how to do it.”

Apart from the moral issue, cheaters are often caught. And AI-produced school papers may come across as generic, homogeneous or, on the other end of the spectrum, total bull.

“It’s often obvious to a teacher, who might [say], ‘Wow, your writing has really changed. This doesn’t sound like you,’ ” King says.

Stanford University researchers Victor Lee and Denise Pope say cheating rates among high schoolers have been high for a long time. But while 60 percent to 70 percent of students surveyed have reported cheating through the years, Lee’s and Pope’s latest ongoing research shows that cheating rates have stayed about the same or even decreased slightly since AI chatbots like ChatGPT came along.

5. Learn the best ways to prompt

Obviously, students “should never claim they’ve done some work that they’ve not done,” says Helen Crompton, executive director of the Research Institute for Digital Innovation in Learning at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She’s also a professor of instructional technology at the school and says an AI bot can function as a copilot of sorts for learning.

Crompton recommends that students prompt AIs along these lines:

• I’ve got to write an essay. Provide one-sentence starter ideas or topic suggestions.
• I’m about to start a biology class and am a bit nervous. Give me some major glossary words that I need to know to get ready.
• I didn’t quite understand this concept. Please explain it. Then, please explain it even more simply, as if I were a fifth grader.
• I’m preparing for a test on a specific topic. Quiz me with some sample questions.

An example: A student attending one of Marx’s classes was struggling with grammar. As a fun exercise, the professor fed a couple of paragraphs from the student’s paper into ChatGPT, along with a prompt like this: As a writer, I have a problem with sentence fragments. Can you rewrite these two paragraphs without changing my meaning to correct the sentence fragments, following the style presented in the handbook we use?

ChatGPT not only fixed the mistakes but explained the corrections it made.

“There was an opportunity there for the student to say, ‘Here’s what it is telling me that I’ve done wrong. Let me reflect on that,’ ” Marx says. AI can help students by offering opposing viewpoints, alternate perspectives and critical feedback.

OpenAI recently introduced a creative writing coach as one of its personalized AI agents called GPTs, an acronym that stands for generative pretrained transformers. They’re available to subscribers of the company’s $20-a-month ChatGPT Plus plan. The coach suggests ways the writing it’s given can be improved and aims to read passages for clarity, relevance and structure.

6. Preach politeness

When adults talk to an AI, they’re setting examples for children, Crompton says.

“Model politeness,” she says.

That’s also a good practice when talking to smart speakers and their digital assistants. Both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are rolling out generative AI in the products you may already have, and Apple is expected to jump on the bandwagon next year with improvements to Siri.

“We’ve gotten so used to [barking out instructions like] ‘Give me the weather!’ ” Google’s Krawczyk says. “I would never ask my spouse that. [Instead try,] ‘What do you think is a nice thing to do on a day like today?’ It’s really amazing to see how the technology kind of morphs to kindness.”

7. AI may help you land or keep a job

Your kids will need to understand AI by the time they enter the workforce. Grammarly recently commissioned a study with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Consulting that revealed 70 percent of employees surveyed at large businesses use generative AI for most or all their writing at work.

Although just a fourth of employers have a generative AI strategy in place now, 97 percent are expected to have one by 2025. And when Junior needs to apply for a job, AI can help with resumes and cover letters.

“We as parents and teachers … owe it to this rising generation to give them exposure to this,” Maxwell says. “But [we must] do it in a way now where they can understand what they will forgo by just pushing the ‘easy’ button.”

This story, originally published Nov. 17, 2023, was updated with the results of a Stanford University survey.