A nine-year-old in Norman, Oklahoma, told WIRED that AI should stand for "artificial idiot."

She has company. Elana Klein talked to kids, parents and teachers around the country and found a generation far less impressed by AI than adults assume. A middle school science teacher in Los Angeles says her students call people dumb for using it. Parents on Bluesky report their children using "that's AI" to mean "that's BS."

The numbers hold up the anecdotes. YPulse found that 37 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds cringe at AI-generated music and video, and more than half worry about misinformation and deepfakes. Pew found that more than a quarter think AI will hurt society over the next 20 years. Kids worry about their jobs, their ability to think and the technology’s environmental cost. They also resent how aggressively adults and technology companies are selling it to them.

Some students are turning that skepticism into rules for schools. Greg Toppo reports in The 74 that 100 students from all 50 states gathered in Boston this month to debate what amounted to an AI Bill of Rights for schools. The final proposal passed 83–15. Students said AI literacy should begin as soon as devices enter the classroom and cover misinformation, plagiarism, bias, privacy, environmental effects, and how the technology actually works.

They drew practical lines. AI can create practice problems or help a student brainstorm. It shouldn’t answer the test or make the art. Younger students need tighter limits; teenagers need room to make decisions and learn from mistakes. As one 17-year-old put it, schools should teach students to use AI responsibly because “it is something that is going to be in their future.”

An earlier technological revolution produced a useful philosophy for this moment. Traffic safety instruction began as automobiles became an unavoidable part of American life: a separate driver education course in Gilbert, Minnesota, in 1923, then Amos Neyhart's course at State College High School in Pennsylvania a decade later, where one student drove while three classmates rode along as observers. By 1940, more than twenty states and several hundred high schools had followed. A National Education Association history of the field summed up the approach in one line in 1966: "Safety doesn't say 'don't do it'; it says 'do it safely.'"

Lisa O'Masta, who leads Learning.com, made that argument about social media in 2024, writing in U.S. News after her own son was drawn into an online group through Discord. Bans can limit what children are exposed to, she wrote, but they can't teach a student to evaluate information, protect their privacy or notice when a product is engineered to hold their attention. Eventually someone hands the phone back. What matters then is whether the student knows what to do with it.

Two pieces today extend that argument:

Read together, the policy debate looks slightly misaimed. Adults are arguing about how much technology to allow. The kids in WIRED's story are making finer distinctions than that: the AI overview that put whales in Lake Superior, the "slop" display in the school lobby, the fake Steph Curry video that stopped being funny the second it was labeled. They're frequently right.

That’s media literacy. Students are already practicing it. Driver’s ed suggests what schools should add: enough knowledge and practice to turn instinct into judgment, especially when no adult is in the passenger seat.

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