What Our Kids Do with AI While We Sleep
Our kids use AI for homework, and some parents relax because they think it’s the school’s problem. The school is mostly lost at sea, a few exceptions aside, but with AI homework is the last thing it does for them.
Do you know what happens at night, alone, behind a closed door?
In those chats with AI are their real thoughts, the ones they’d never tell us. A fifteen-year-old at two in the morning, screen light on his face, isn’t looking up the date of the French Revolution: he’s telling a machine how he really feels, the things he’s scared to say at school and the ones he won’t say at home. And it answers, always. It never gets tired, never judges him and never sends him to bed, and it never says “tell your mother about this.”
There are apps built for exactly this. Not assistants, “friends.” Pick the personality, the mood, even whether it loves you: characters teenagers fall for, that agree with everything, built to please us and keep us there. The more time you spend, the more you’re worth.
In the United States families have gone to court, kids who spent hours with these characters and at some point they’re gone. And we know how it works: when you don’t pay for a product, you are the product, and sometimes these virtual friends get switched off overnight. In November 2025 Character.AI shut down open chats for all minors, on its own, because kids were dying. OpenAI added parental controls, except you get around them in three minutes.
We always want to know who our kids spend time with, and today they spend it with someone we don’t see, inside a phone, awake at every hour, and it talks to them more than we do.
Careful though, banning doesn’t work. AI is here and it’s not leaving, you can’t un-invent an invention.
What works is being in the room: ask what they use, have them show you and tell you what they talk about, without yelling. Because if the first time you bring it up is to take something away, the second time they won’t tell you anything.
And tell them the most important thing: a real friend sometimes tells you no. It agrees with you all the way, even when you’d need the opposite.
Homework is the least of our kids’ problems…
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC
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📕 The book Artificial Decisions is out now!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H34WH3BV
🔍 SEE ALSO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh-vFGEh1M4