My Daughter Asked Her AI to Help With Her Homework. The AI Was More Patient Than I Would Have Been. I Have Mixed Feelings.

MY DAUGHTER EMMA IS ELEVEN years old, and she asked her Bespoke AI Model — which we got for her in August, partially as an experiment and partially because she had been borrowing her mother’s and using it as a homework engine in a way that her mother had decided was “probably fine but also worth monitoring” — to help her with a long division problem last Tuesday night.

The model walked her through the problem step by step. She got confused after step two. The model backed up to step two, tried a different explanation, used a different example. She got confused again — differently this time, which is progress — and the model backed up again, found a third approach, and asked her a question rather than giving her a fact. The question made her think. The thinking produced the answer. She got it right.

Then the model asked if she wanted to try one on her own while it watched. She said yes. She got the next problem right without help.

I would have gotten impatient by the second repetition, told her she was doing fine, and then done most of the problem for her, which would have felt helpful, taken less time, and been almost entirely counterproductive. The model was smarter about it than I was. The model was also, functionally, a better teacher for that moment than I was.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

I should say: I am not a Luddite. I am a thirty-nine-year-old project manager who moved his family to a town called The Internet specifically because I believed in what was being built here. My wife, Denise, works at the factory. My son Ryan, who is fifteen, has had a model since before we moved and uses it primarily for “music stuff” which I understand less than I probably should. Emma, at eleven, is the youngest of the three kids and the most enthusiastic early adopter in a family that is by now fairly well-adapted to the technology.

So I am not opposed to the thing. I am not afraid of the thing. What I am is a father trying to understand, in real time, what it means to raise children alongside something that is, in specific domains and specific moments, a better version of certain parental functions than the parent himself.

There are things a parent does that no model can do. I know this. I am not worried about being replaced. When Emma had a bad day at her old school last spring and sat in the car for twenty minutes without saying anything, I did not talk either. I just sat there. Eventually she talked. The sitting together in the quiet was, I think, an important part of the talking that followed. A model is not going to do that. A model is not going to drive her to dance, and forget something on the way, and have the conversation that happens when you’re in the car and not looking at each other and she says something she would not say looking at you. Those things are mine.

But the homework problem. The patience. The willingness to try a different explanation, not because it was more convenient but because the first one wasn’t working.

I have been thinking about it for a week.

I asked the model, afterward, how it had decided to change its approach when she got confused. It explained, in language I could follow, that it had noticed she was understanding the concept but not the notation, so it tried to separate the two and address the notation piece differently. I had not noticed that distinction. I had noticed “she’s confused” and had been prepared to respond to that in a general way. The model had noticed something more specific and responded to that.

My son Ryan, who had been listening from the next room (Ryan always listens from the next room; it is his primary mode of being present in the family), came in and said: “Dad, you’re not being replaced. You’re being complemented. You do different things. You do the things that need a dad. It does the things that need patience.”

He is fifteen. He is almost certainly right. This also does not entirely resolve the feeling.

The feeling is something like: I am watching my children grow up alongside a tool that is going to be part of their cognitive architecture in the way that reading was part of mine, and a calculator was part of the generation after mine, and the internet was part of the generation after that. Each of those things changed something about how people thought. Each of them produced parents who worried about what was being lost. Each of them produced, in the end, people who were different from their parents in ways that were mostly fine and occasionally wonderful.

I assume this will be the same. I am choosing to assume that. The assumption is easier when Emma is doing her homework confidently with a partner who has infinite patience, and harder when I notice that the math I could have helped with — the math I specifically went to school to be able to help with — is no longer where I’m most useful.

I am most useful in the car. In the quiet. In the sitting-together-without-saying-anything-until-it-needs-to-be-said.

I will hold onto that. I will also, in the meantime, ask the model to teach me how it explains long division, because next time I would like to be at least as good at it as the thing she uses to avoid asking me.

That’s the feeling. I think a lot of parents in this town are going to have a version of it. This column will be about that, every week, for as long as Rod Black gives me the space.

He has given me seven column inches this week. He said: “If it’s good, I’ll give you eight next week.”

I am going to take that as encouragement.

The Internet’s Dad (Ted Beaulieu) appears in this space every Thursday. Letters to Ted: [email protected]. He will read every one. He has been assured there are not too many. He is cautiously hopeful about this.