What Students Really Think About AI (and Why We Should Listen)

Adults love to narrate kids’ relationship with technology, as if they were describing some exotic species. Parents wring their hands about AI melting young brains, teachers debate whether ChatGPT is salvation or sabotage, policymakers move to outright bans. The real story isn’t what the adults say, it’s what kids already know.

This hit home when I read Charley Locke’s WIRED article “What Do Kids Actually Think About AI?” The article profiles six teenagers, each trying to make sense of this strange new technology. For example, one 15-year-old in Los Angeles described using ChatGPT to study for history class by turning his notes into practice quiz questions (instead of just grabbing answers) and admitted he always types “please” and “thank you,” just in case AI ever takes over the world. Reading their words, I realized that there's a lot we have yet to learn about this technology and how to let the youth shape it with us.

I was struck by the nuance of these teens’ perspectives on AI. They’re not wide-eyed techno-optimists, nor are they reckless nihilists letting the robots run wild. Many students are critical of AI’s shortcomings and mindful of its risks. One high schooler from Colorado recounted building an AI device to prevent car accidents with deer by training a model on thermal camera footage to detect animals on the road. Hardly the work of a stereotypical lazy teen. On the flip side, a 15-year-old from the Bronx told WIRED she refuses to use ChatGPT at all. Partly because it’s banned at her school (get caught and you’re kicked out of class), partly because she’s alarmed at how AI might “infiltrate everything”. If you start letting AI draft your text messages, she warns, eventually “you become a robot”. These kids are only in high school, yet they’re already grappling with questions of authenticity, safety, and where to draw the line with automation. Their BS detectors are alive and well.

A 14-year-old artist in New York confessed she’s nervous about AI-generated art and music. For her, letting an algorithm paint would cheapen the joy she gets from creating things herself. Meanwhile, another student mused that in all those sci-fi stories, AI was supposed to handle the boring jobs while humans did the creative stuff, yet in reality people are using AI to generate fake videos for profit. He remarked that AI could have been used to build a utopia, “but a bunch of people thought this would make more money, so this is what AI now is”. Leave it to a seventh-grader to cut through the noise and call out capitalism in the same breath as discussing deepfakes and Will Smith.

These anecdotes paint a picture of a generation that is both curious about AI and critical of its pitfalls. Yes, plenty of teens are using ChatGPT to make their lives a bit easier: summarizing notes, generating ideas, or getting un-stuck on math homework. But they’re doing so with eyes wide open. As one 16-year-old put it, if you lean on AI to do all your work, “that’s your loss… you lose your skills to write and read”. They know the cost of over-reliance. It’s the adults who often assume extremes (either “AI will destroy education” or “kids will just cheat and stop thinking”). Talk to the kids themselves, and you find pragmatists who joke about robot uprisings one minute and point out AI’s very real biases or environmental costs the next.

All of this resonates deeply with us at Sonar. From the start, we knew that if we wanted our AI to actually help young people, we needed to invite young people to the table. So we created the Sonar Changemakers program: a diverse group of students from around the country who co-design with us. These teens weigh in on everything, from the wording of Sonny’s prompts, to the app’s interface colors, to our approach on sensitive issues.

The Changemakers keep us honest. They’ll tell us straight when something feels off. One student once looked at a draft message and said our slang was “cringe.” She was right. Another reminded us that “AI feels like a tool but sometimes a friend” acknowledging that utility and intimacy can coexist in the same product. Our youth advisors have pushed us on topics like privacy and consent. Involving students so closely in building a product was initially a leap of faith but it’s turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. Not only is our product better for it, but it’s changed how I, as an adult in tech, view the next generation.

Working with these students has convinced me that we underestimate young people’s capacity to engage with technology. We shouldn’t. Far from being passive subjects of “disruption,” they’re active agents in it. They are the users, but also the critics, the tinkerers, sometimes even the inventors. We’d be foolish not to include them in conversations that’s rapidly reshaping education, work, and social life.

So the next time we find ourselves fretting in a meeting or at the dinner table about “kids these days” and their AI (or whatever the tech du jour is), maybe we should do the obvious thing that we somehow keep forgetting: ask the kids. How are you using it? What do you think? What would you do with it if you ran the world? We might be delighted (or a little humbled) by the answers. I know I have been.

At the end of the day, working with these bright young people has made me a lot less anxious about the future of AI. Sure, the technology is racing ahead in sometimes scary ways but there’s a generation rising to meet it. Our job might simply be to hand them the mic and really listen. The kids are more than alright when it comes to AI. And they just might help lead the way, if we let them.