Mom and Cub talk about AI

Tiger Cub 

I’m terrible at using AI. It’s frankly kind of embarrassing given how much I know about it—after all, I wrote a speech on regulating it and was a research assistant for an AI legal ethics class. Despite all that, I’m not entirely comfortable using it. You, on the other hand, are a massive fan. In fact, the intro to my speech this past debate season was a joke about your overuse of AI. 

Tiger Mom 

You’re right that I find AI incredibly useful. But it’s just a tool—like a calculator, a spreadsheet, online search, or shared documents. Learning to use it well is a skill. And like any powerful technology, it changes how we do things. We ignore those changes at our own peril. 

Over time, I’ve learned to use AI for various tasks. It’s made some things easier and others more complex. I’ve trained ChatGPT and Claude to understand my writing, speaking, and thinking styles. That lets me use them to assess my work and generate new ideas. I don’t use AI to write for me—writing should be rooted in original thought—but I find it invaluable for research, brainstorming, and even critique. We train technology, and in turn, it trains us. 

Since AI emerged so early in your life, I assumed it would be second nature. When I was your age, I had just gotten access to email for the first time. It was magical—to communicate instantly instead of mailing letters. I remember sending a letter to my friend Danny in North Carolina, and he replied with a written letter which included his new address. Thanks to him, I became the first student in my school to use email. What used to take weeks suddenly took minutes. 

Tiger Cub

AI probably should be second nature to me, but as you said, it’s a skill. Skills have to be learned, and it’s just not something I have learned yet. My high school both encourages and discourages AI. We technically have access to school-connected Gemini accounts, but actually using AI often results in lower marks in certain classes. It’s available, but the culture around it discourages us from exploring it. 

Recently, one of my teachers said we could use AI to help brainstorm for a project, but only that. I ended up not using it at all. It would’ve been a hassle for such a small part of the task, especially since my group could just do it faster ourselves. Plus, I didn’t have enough experience with AI to use it efficiently. By the time we’re finally allowed to use AI, it’s been discouraged for so long that hardly anyone knows how to use it in a way that actually improves our work. 

Tiger Mom 

I understand where your school is coming from. When you and your siblings were younger, I spent hours teaching you guys addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You could’ve done all of that with a calculator, but you needed to learn the basics of math so that you could understand the basis of the more advanced math you would actually use the calculator for. Just like a calculator, AI is a tool that you should employ after you have already learned the basics of writing, reasoning, and thinking. I believe students should learn to leverage AI, but only after they have mastered the reasoning and skills behind it. 

Tiger Cub 

Sure, AI and calculators are both tools, but their intent is different. I use calculators to solve problems that have a single correct answer. AI, on the other hand, deals with open-ended questions. Its answers depend on how you ask, and even then, there’s no correct result, just a scale of good to bad. 

My favorite artist is Mondrian. His work is remarkable because of his philosophy and process. AI can copy his style, but it can’t create something with the intent of furthering his philosophy. I can request that of the AI, but at the end of the day, the

AI is only generating based on patterns, not seeing the philosophy within the work. No matter how hard it tries, it’s not the same. 

Tiger Mom 

I agree that AI isn’t like a calculator. There’s no universal right answer in creative work. But that’s exactly why I want schools to teach kids to ask better questions and to examine problems from different angles. That’s what I hope you’ll practice someday. 

As my friend Li Fan said, “You will not be replaced by AI, “You won’t be replaced by AI. You will be replaced by the person who knows how to harness AI.” 

I believe AI is a transformative technology, just like personal computers and mobile phones were in their time. In this new era, we have to learn not just what to use, but how and why behind it. The future won’t belong to those who already have the answers, but to those who know how to ask the right questions. We don’t go to farriers or candlemakers anymore. Typist pools and key-punch operators are a thing of the past. As technology evolves, we have to change with it. 

Tiger Cub 

The value of asking questions lies in the creativity and variety of answers. If I asked everyone on Earth their favorite animal, I’d get wildly different responses. AI, meanwhile, would just spit out the most common or expected answers. 

AI doesn’t create new ideas. It repurposes existing ones. Sure, the sentences it generates may be new, but they’re built from past data. While a lot of life is built on repurposed ideas (this very article is inspired by thoughts passed down to me) some parts of life require breaking new ground.

You can’t solve truly hard problems by relying only on the past. You have to reframe questions to find real answers. That’s one of AI’s limitations. While it might one day train itself, right now it’s still a biased creation, confined to its training data. 

Humans still matter because AI can’t replicate the human touch. If I gave ChatGPT all my major life events, it wouldn’t see them as a story—just as data points, patterns to analyze. But human experience, storytelling, and emotion? That’s what makes us who we are. AI can only mimic that, never truly embody it.