HOW TO TALK TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT AI.

My God, it’s full of stars!

It’s funny—on one hand, there are so many moments where I feel like a kid again, handed an endless box of new, amazing toys to play with. I can lose hours just seeing what AI can do, testing the limits of these tools, exploring what they’re capable of, and letting my imagination run wild. It’s like having access to a creative superpower at my fingertips. Every new discovery feels like peeling back the layers of what’s possible, and I can’t help but get swept up in the excitement of it all.

Then I think about my son. We make time every day to sit down and draw together, to nurture creativity in its simplest, most hands-on form. There’s something grounding about pencil on paper—the way it slows down your thoughts and makes you focus on the process. It’s a tradition, something that feels pure, and it helps him (and me) connect with the act of creating, without any shortcuts.

But at the same time, he’s growing up in a world where these incredible tools exist. He sees them too—he’s not oblivious to the magic of AI and its ability to create stunning images in seconds or expand a snippet of a bedtime story into a whole narrative we can read together. He’s curious, of course. How could he not be? When you’re a kid, everything new feels like magic, and the idea that you can create whole worlds so effortlessly is irresistible.

The luddite in me—the part that wants to preserve some sense of “the way things were”—sometimes wonders if it would be better to hide these tools from him for a while longer. Let him develop his creativity without relying on these powerful shortcuts, let him build the muscles of imagination the old-fashioned way. But the reality is, that’s not the world we live in anymore. AI isn’t some future possibility—it’s here, and it’s changing the way we all interact with creativity. This is the world he’s growing up in, and it’s the world he’s going to be part of.

I’ve already started teaching him how to use some of the pre-AI tools that have been part of my own work for years. When he was just six, he was putting together PowerPoint presentations to express ideas he wanted to get across. That kind of confidence in using technology to communicate is something I couldn’t have imagined at his age. But it’s his reality now, and it blows my mind to think about what the world will look like when he’s my age, possibly teaching someone else how to navigate tools that I can’t even begin to imagine.

It’s exciting, it’s overwhelming, and it’s a little terrifying all at once. But as much as I want to slow down time and keep things simple for him, I know that navigating this new landscape is part of his growth. And I get to be there, watching him balance between the world of pencil and paper and the endless possibilities of AI, just as I’m learning to balance it myself.