What I Tell Kids About AI
A guide for teenagers and the parents who forward things to them.
My book SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is out 3 July 2026. Pre-order at superskillsbook.com
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Friends,
You are reading this because someone, probably a parent or a teacher, has sent it to you. So I will keep it short, useful, and honest.
Most teenagers think AI means ChatGPT. It doesn’t. There are tools that will make you smarter. Tools that will let you build things you could not build before. And tools that will hollow your brain out, which there is now evidence to prove. ChatGPT, by itself, is rarely the best of any of them.
This is a list for the teenagers who want to use AI well. It is also a list for the parent who sent it, because almost nobody in working life today learned how to use AI at school, and the people who get good at it now are the ones who will do well in the next decade. So if you got this from a parent, do the courses together. If you got it from a friend, send it to your parents. The same rules apply to all of you.
Who this is from
Twenty years in education, school governor, two daughters, and a book on this exact subject coming in July (SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 3rd July 2026). Not a tech company. Nobody is paying me when you click a link. This is what I am going to tell my own kids this summer when we sit down for a week to go through it.
Be human first
In the years ahead, everyone will talk to you about AI. Friends, teachers, your school, the internet, career advisers, your parents, the headlines, the adverts. The whole noise of the next decade is going to be AI, AI, AI.
The most important thing for you to be in the next decade is human. That is why I wrote my book. That is the whole argument behind it. Everything else in this list is a tool, and every tool below is in service of a person who has chosen their path.
So before you think of AI: do the human things. Do projects. Join Model UN. Do debating. Play sport. Play music. Work with people. Have relationships. Hang out with your friends in person. Discuss films and music and videos with people whose opinions you can argue with. Go to concerts. Dance. Read books that are too long for you. Be a bit naughty sometimes. Be good when it counts. Have jokes. Try things. Don’t try other things. Have experiences. Talk to old people about their lives. Travel somewhere. Get something wrong in front of someone and live through the embarrassment.
Demonstrate, every single week, that you are human. Then think about AI.
How this list is shaped
Understand it first. Learn with it second. Build with it third. Play with it fourth. The tool you reach for first will shape what you think AI is for. Most of these tools require you to be at least 13, some 18. Check before you sign up.
Part 1: Understand AI
Before you use AI, you should understand what AI actually is. None of the resources below need a technical background, none of them need a credit card, and all of them teach the same lesson. AI is not magic, it is not intelligent in the way you are intelligent, and the people who do best with it are the ones who understand its mechanics.
Couch to 5K for AI at couchto5k.ai A free thirty-day course built by Hilary Gridley, who wanted a tool that did not exist yet and built it. About ten minutes a day. Takes you from “I keep meaning to figure out this AI thing” to actually being good at it. The best place to start, because it builds a habit rather than dumping information on you. If you just do one thing, do this.
Elements of AI at elementsofai.com A free course built by the University of Helsinki and MinnaLearn. More than two million people have taken it across 170 countries. It is the best non-technical introduction to what AI is, what it can do, and what it cannot. About six hours of material in total, broken into chapters you can do fifteen minutes at a time. Suitable from around 14 upwards.
Experience AI at experience-ai.org Built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in partnership with Google DeepMind. Free lessons designed for 11 to 14 year olds, with classroom resources for teachers and home-learning material a parent and child can work through together. The strongest UK-anchored option for younger teens.
Google AI Quests at research.google/ai-quests A free game-based learning experience for ages 11 to 14, built with the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. You play the role of a Google researcher applying AI to real problems like flood forecasting. You collect data, build a model, and see how the decisions you make shape the AI’s output. The point of the exercise is not to use AI but to understand how it gets built in the first place.
3Blue1Brown’s neural networks series on YouTube Grant Sanderson’s animated explanations of how neural networks work, free on his channel. If you have ever wondered what is happening inside one of these models when it answers a question, this is the visual explanation that finally makes it click. Made for the curious, not the technical.
Andrej Karpathy’s general audience track at karpathy.ai Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and led AI at Tesla. His “Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT” and “How I use LLMs” videos on YouTube are long, but they are extraordinary. They are probably the best public explanation of what these systems actually are. For older teens who want the deep version, this is where to go.
Part 2: Learn and think with AI
The tools in this section are for moments when your brain is doing the work and you want help going further. They are not answer machines. They are thinking partners, and the distinction matters because most teenagers default to ChatGPT for everything, and ChatGPT is rarely the best tool for any specific job.
My eldest daughter is at university now. For most of her time at school, she barely touched AI. Not because we banned it, but because she had worked out, on her own, that her brain was still growing and that she wanted to do the reading and the wrestling and the working-it-out herself. Now, she uses AI almost every week. She reads the papers first. She writes her thoughts first. Then she brings AI in to find sources she has missed, to argue against her own thesis, to test where her thinking is weakest. Brain first. Tool second. Every tool below is designed to support that order.
NotebookLM at notebooklm.google Free from Google. You upload your own sources, like textbook chapters, lecture notes, articles or PDFs, and NotebookLM becomes an expert on those sources only. It does not invent things. It cites where every claim came from. It can produce study guides, flashcards, and even an audio overview that sounds like two podcasters discussing your material. The free tier is generous: 100 notebooks, 50 sources per notebook, up to 500,000 words per source. For revision, this is probably the single best free tool available to a teenager today.
Perplexity at perplexity.ai A search engine that thinks. Where Google gives you a list of links and ChatGPT gives you a confident answer, Perplexity gives you an answer with citations you can actually check. Reach for it when you want to know something AND you want to be able to verify what you have been told. The free tier is enough for most school work.
Gemini Guided Learning inside the Gemini app Google’s tutoring mode inside Gemini. Rather than handing you a quick answer, it asks probing questions that push you to think a problem through yourself. Switch Gemini into Guided Learning mode or “Help me Learn” when you are revising or working through something tricky. It is one of the clearest signs that the big AI companies are starting to build tools that do not replace your brain.
Claude at claude.ai Made by Anthropic. Currently has the strongest reputation for thoughtful, longer-form reasoning, and is more willing than its competitors to admit when it is uncertain. The free tier is good for school-age use. Particularly strong for essay drafting once your own thinking is already done, debugging code, and working through complex ideas. The Projects feature lets you keep a folder of related files in context across conversations, which makes it useful for sustained work like coursework or revision. Cowork and Claude Code is the next level up and worth it if you can afford it and will use it.
Wolfram Alpha at wolframalpha.com Not new, not trendy, and absolutely essential. Wolfram is a computational engine, which means it actually does the maths rather than predicting what the answer should look like. Most chatbots hallucinate maths and physics far more often than people realise. Wolfram does not. Use it for the calculation, and a chatbot for the explanation, never the other way around. The free tier covers equations, graphs, chemistry, statistics, and more.
Goblin Tools at goblin.tools A small collection of single-purpose AI tools, originally built for neurodivergent users and useful to almost everyone. The most important one is Magic ToDo, which takes a big task you are dreading (”revise for mocks”, “write the personal statement”, “tidy my room”) and breaks it into small, doable steps you can actually start with. Free, no signup, no account. If you are the kind of teenager who freezes when something feels too big, this is probably the most useful tool on this entire list that nobody mentions.
For older teens who want to go further: Notion AI at notion.so is for building your own personal operating system, with revision databases, application trackers, and reading lists in one place. Readwise Reader at readwise.io/read turns articles, PDFs, podcasts and YouTube videos into a knowledge library you can search and revisit. Both have free tiers. Neither is necessary to start with.
One last thing in this section that may turn out to matter more than any of the tools above. Talking to AI rather than typing at it is the next big shift, and the teenagers who get used to it early will have a real advantage. I have been using Wispr Flow for a while, which lets you speak naturally and turns it into clean text everywhere on your computer. It changes the way you think when you write. You start thinking into the machine rather than typing at it. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all have voice modes now too, and NotebookLM will read your sources back to you as a podcast. Voice is not a gimmick. Get comfortable with it now and the awkwardness pays back.
Part 3: Build with AI
This is where you can make useful stuff quickly. The bespoke family app. The website in an hour. The reference-material consolidator. The shoestring-budget holiday. Pick one of them and have a go. The point is that anything is possible now.
Start here
Replit at replit.com The most education-focused of the AI app builders. You type what you want, the AI builds it, and you can see and learn from the code along the way. Strong free tier. Collaborative features mean you can build alongside a friend, or have a parent looking over your shoulder. The right choice if you want to actually understand what is being built. From age 13.
Bolt at bolt.new A browser-based, full-stack app builder. You describe what you want and Bolt generates a working web app. The fastest path I know of from “I have an idea” to “the idea is online and someone can use it.”
Explore later
Lovable at lovable.dev for polished apps without learning the underlying code first.
Google AI Studio at aistudio.google.com for prototyping with the Gemini models and learning how to prompt them well.
Google Labs at labs.google for the experimental edge: Learn Your Way, Flow, Whisk, and dozens of others.
Gamma at gamma.app for generating clean presentation decks from a description or a set of notes. Useful for school projects and pitches.
v0 at v0.app for designing nice-looking React interfaces if that is your thing.
GitHub Copilot Free at github.com/features/copilot for the AI assistant that lives inside your code editor, once you are learning to code properly.
Part 4: Create and play with AI
This is where AI becomes properly fun. Use these for projects rather than for school work. The split matters, because once you have built something fun with AI, like a song or a video or an image, you understand in your bones that it is a tool you direct, not a service you consume.
Nano Banana, Google’s image model inside the Gemini, Google’s flagship image generator, accessible from inside Gemini. Particularly good at character consistency across multiple images. Use it for story illustrations, custom cards, posters, anything visual you can describe in words.
Suno at suno.com Generates songs from a description. Pop, rock, classical, hip-hop, almost anything. The free tier gives you a handful of generations a day. Brilliant for soundtracks to school projects, custom birthday songs, or just messing around. The age limit is 13.
Veo and Seedance (Google’s video model and the multi-model aggregator) - Text to video. You describe a scene and you get a short HD clip. Veo lives within Gemini with a free rate-limited tier. Seedance gives you 100 daily free credits, 1080p output, no watermark, and access to multiple models (Veo, Sora, Kling) in one interface. probably the best free video tier available right now.
Quick, Draw! at quickdraw.withgoogle.com A neural network tries to guess what you are drawing. Old, free, no signup needed, and probably the best fifteen-minute introduction to what machine learning actually is for younger teens.
MusicFX and TextFX at labs.google Google’s experimental music and text generation tools. Free, browser-based, mostly no signup needed.
Part 5: Get serious about prompting
If you want to go further, prompt engineering is the closest thing to a real skill in working with AI. The good news is that the foundations are taught for free by the people who built the models in the first place.
A small example before the tools, to give you the feel for it. Bad prompt: “Explain photosynthesis.” Better prompt: “I’m 14, I understand cells and energy, but I keep getting confused at the chlorophyll bit. Explain photosynthesis using only what I already know, then push me one step further.” The second prompt teaches the AI who you are, what you already understand, and what you actually need. Better answers follow. The principle is simple: the more specific you are about what you want, the less useful hallucinations become. Vague prompts invite confident nonsense. Specific prompts invite useful thinking.
Prompt Engineering Tutorial – Master ChatGPT and LLM Responses on YouTube. A free 41-minute video from freeCodeCamp, presented by Ania Kubów. Covers the fundamentals of prompting with practical demonstrations on ChatGPT. The first quarter is foundations on what AI actually is, so if you already know that bit, skip to around 14 minutes in for the practical material. The techniques apply across every AI tool, not just ChatGPT.
Anthropic Academy: AI Fluency for Students at anthropic.skilljar.com A free Anthropic course specifically designed to teach students how to use AI to enhance their learning rather than replace it. The closest thing I know of to a curriculum on the augmentation posture.
Google AI Essentials and Gemini for Students at grow.google/students Free training designed for students. Covers prompting, tool use, and how to bring AI into study habits without becoming dependent on it.
Prompt Cowboy at promptcowboy.ai A different kind of tool. You give it a rough idea of what you want, and it builds a properly structured prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to get a much better result.
Part 6: The money question
Spending money on AI is very easy to start doing. Every tool on this list will, sooner or later, offer you a subscription, and a few of them are worth it for the right person. Most of them, for a teenager, are not. Two things to say.
The first is to stay on the free tiers as long as you possibly can. Almost everything in this list has a free tier that handles school-age use perfectly well. The free tiers exist because the companies want you to become familiar with their tools. Use that. Do not pay until you actually need a paid feature for a specific project, and when you do, pay for one tool, not five.
The second is that if you do subscribe, fund it yourself. A teenager asking a parent to pay £15 (or $20, or €18) a month for ChatGPT Plus, then the same again for Claude Pro, then again for Perplexity Pro, ends up with three subscriptions doing largely overlapping work. Paying out of your own pocket money or your own earnings forces a different question to surface: do I actually need this, or am I subscribing because I assume I should? The answer, almost always, is the second one.
One thing nobody seems to talk about is rotating between tools. For most school work, your queries are not context-dependent. You can use Claude on Monday, Gemini on Tuesday, ChatGPT on Wednesday and Perplexity on Thursday, and lose nothing in the process, because each conversation is fresh anyway. The free tiers across all the major models, used in rotation, give a teenager effectively unlimited daily AI access for free. The only time you really need to commit to one tool is when you are building something sustained, like a long coding project or a piece of coursework you are redrafting over weeks. The companies are competing for your loyalty. Make them earn it.
One last thing on what you are spending. Money is not the only currency these tools take from you. Most of what you type, paste, and upload becomes training data for the next version of the model. Do not feed any of these tools things you would not want a stranger to read. That includes diary-style writing about other people, anything that names a friend in a way they would not want shared, and anything containing personal information about you or your family.
Part 7: The weekly self-audit
The single most important practice in this list is not on the list. It is a question to ask yourself every Sunday night.
In the last week, did using AI make me feel more capable, or more passive?
If the honest answer is “more capable” most weeks, the relationship is working as it should. If the honest answer is “more passive” most weeks, something has slipped, and the next week needs a recalibration. More brain-first work, less AI-first work. More building, less consuming.
A teenager who asks themselves this every week is going to be in the top one per cent of users of these tools. Not because they will use AI more than anyone else, but because they will use it deliberately.
What you are probably already using
The list above is almost certainly not the first time you have ever met an AI tool. Most teenagers are using a handful of the same things, so let me be honest about each.
Grammarly. Fine for typos and grammar. It becomes a problem when it starts rewriting your sentences and your voice slowly leaves the page. Use it for proofreading. Do not let it edit.
QuillBot. A paraphrasing tool that takes someone else’s writing and rewords it to sound like yours. Almost no honest student use, and the plagiarism checkers catch it more often every year.
Photomath. Take a picture of a maths problem, get the answer with steps. The pull is obvious. The problem is too: it teaches you nothing, and the working is the learning. Try the problem first, then check with Wolfram Alpha or get Claude to walk you through the concept. Photomath is the cousin nobody wants to admit to.
Brainly. Homework forum, same problem as Photomath. Stop using it.
ChatGPT and Copilot. Both fine. The danger is not the tool, it is the default. If your first instinct on every assignment is to paste it into ChatGPT, you have stopped learning. Use them for explanation, sparring, second opinions. Not for first drafts.
What I have left off the list, and why
Some widely-used tools are not on this list at all, and that is deliberate.
Character.AI and the family of companion apps that have grown up around it are not here. The whole category exists to mimic friendship and emotional reciprocity, and that is the one corner of AI I would actively steer you away from.
This list also does not contain any anonymous “teen success story” anecdotes. The 16-year-old making 5k a month from a side hustle. The 14-year-old who skipped a grade because of ChatGPT. They make for nice copy, and they are usually invented. Even when they are not, they set up an expectation that AI will deliver outcomes a teenager has to actually earn. The point is setting yourself up. The success follows from that.
How to use this list
You do not need to do all of it. Pick one thing from Part 1 and understand it. Pick one thing from Part 2 and learn with it. Pick one project from Part 3 and build it. Run the weekly self-audit. That is your summer.
If you are a teacher reading this, the same applies in reverse. You almost certainly do not have time to teach this in lessons before the end of term. You absolutely have time to recommend a few of these things for your students to do over the summer holidays. Forward this resource, or steal from it, and make something useful for the kids you are responsible for. If you are not responsible for any of them, you know who is. Send it to them.
One more thing for the parents and the teachers. Print this out. Yes, I know that is bad for the environment. The kids you give it to need something they can scribble on. Mark it up. Cross things out. Write down which two or three of these they will actually try this summer. The act of choosing matters more than the choice itself.
The teenager who comes out of the next decade in good shape will not be the one with the most AI tools. It will be the one who used those tools to spend more time with friends, build more things, play more music, have more arguments, write more bad poems, learn more languages, see more places, and become more themselves.
This is the second piece in a two-part Box of Amazing series on AI and family. The first, “What I Tell Parents About AI”, was published last week. SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, is published by Kogan Page on the 3rd of July 2026. Pre-order at superskillsbook.com.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
→ superskillsbook.com → thesuperskills.com → Book a discovery call
PS. If your organisation is thinking about AI and human capability, I keynote and advise on this. I also do bulk book orders for teams.
Tools I Use:
Jamie: AI Note taker without a bot. You join the meeting. The Bot doesn’t.
Wispr Flow: Just dictate everything to your laptop and phone. Game Changer
Manus: Best AI agent to do things for you. Agentise your intelligence.
Claude Cowork: Delegate complex tasks to your friendly Claude Agent
Recommend Reading:
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If you enjoyed this, forward it to someone who’d find it useful. And if you haven’t yet, pre-order SuperSkills at superskillsbook.com - out 3 July and get the pre-order bonuses.