Kids say AI is crude but useful—and worry most about society, not jobs

The interviews reveal that kids' relationship with AI is far more pragmatic and bounded than adult stereotypes suggest. Rather than either uncritically embracing the technology or reflexively rejecting it, most teens are using AI for narrow, specific tasks—grammar checking, debugging code, information retrieval—while explicitly declining to outsource thinking or creativity. This mirrors the Pew data: teens are over four times more likely to use AI for harmless information tasks than potentially harmful ones. What stands out is that kids' concerns track less with moral panic (job displacement, addiction) and more with genuine sustainability and epistemology issues: one interviewee worried about data-center water consumption affecting local ecosystems; another about misinformation and loss of critical thinking. The kids interviewed who built things with AI—like the 18-year-old's Next Voters project, which simplifies government documents into actionable summaries—framed the technology as a tool for reducing barriers to participation, not replacing human judgment. Several explicitly stated they want to keep control: 'we want to use it to disperse knowledge' and 'deal people the cards and let them play them however they want.' This suggests that among young people already engaged with technology, AI adoption is conditional and intentional rather than passive.