AI and Our Kids: What Parents Need to Know (with Chris McKenna)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world our kids are growing up in—but how should parents think about it?

In this episode, I’m joined again by Chris McKenna from Protect Young Eyes to discuss the growing influence of AI on children, families, and everyday life. We talk about the opportunities, dangers, and practical ways parents can begin having wise conversations with their kids about artificial intelligence.

We discuss:

• What AI actually is and why it matters for parents
• How AI is already shaping the lives of kids and teens
• Potential dangers and concerns families should be aware of
• How parents can talk about AI with wisdom and discernment
• Why discipleship and critical thinking matter in an AI-driven world

As technology continues to develop rapidly, parents don’t need to respond with fear—but they do need wisdom. This conversation is designed to help families think carefully and biblically about the future our kids are stepping into.

🔗 Learn more about Protect Young Eyes:

Watch this interview on YOUTUBE

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Discipling Kids Podcast, where practical parenting meets practiced theology for families and ministries, discipling kids for Christ. I'm your host, Pastor John Scheller. Welcome everyone. We have Chris McKenna back with us on Discipling Kids to talk to us about artificial intelligence, AI, a new technology that as adults we're beginning to use more and more. And how can we be guiding our children with this new technology? Chris, thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Yeah, you know, social media is something that's in the news a lot, and it took us a lot of years to figure out that being on social media maybe wasn't the best for us as much, you know, as it was touted as being great. And you know, here's the thing I don't, I'm not all doom and gloom. I I run a business through social media, John, and I know that churches, you know, promote themselves and there are wonderful ways for certain narrow uses. I think it's great. For a brother of mine who lives overseas so that I can see pictures of his family, it's great for existing relationships that I have to foster them in ways that you know I can stay somewhat connected, it's great. And I think, and on the other hand, when it's uh full surrogate, when it's doom scrolling scrolling, when it's strangers, when it's constant comparison, right? That's the downside to some of those those benefits. And I think the same is true with you know artificial intelligence. There are ways that it enhances my business. It is there are ways that I can um use it to take ideas of mine and maybe give me some other ideas that I hadn't thought of. Um, but with that, I think we always have to remember this is still a very experimental technology. There's still a lot that we don't know about it. They are building the plane as we are in it, and we are the test subjects. We being the humans. We are the rats in the lab when it comes to artificial intelligence. And our children are especially the rats in the lab when I see schools that are trying to push AI into classrooms, which a whole separate conversation I think could be had in a podcast with you, John, about those thoughts, because I don't think any AI should be used in K-8 schooling at all until we know more about it. But, you know, for the average parent who might be listening to this, there's some basic things that I think we need to understand. And it starts with understanding why young people are drawn to it in the way that they are. It's important to know that during different developmental phases, our brains desire certain things and respond in certain ways. Our young people, especially our tweens and teens, have this deep desire to connect with others like them. One of my friends, you know, kind of in the advocacy space here, he talks about that deep feeling. In young people, it's like hunger to them, right? For us, hunger is the survival of feed me, but them, teens and adolescents and their relationships, they so long to find relationship with others like them, to find this sort of tribe of other humans that they can relate to and interact with, that it's sort of that survival-level instinct when you're at that phase of life. All right. So everyone listening to this, kind of put a pin in that idea for a minute that connecting with others and feeling connected to others is as deep a feeling as hunger to the adolescent brain. All right, let's put a pin in that. Now, let's talk about what AI can be. So AI is connection, but it is connection with a thing instead of a who. It deeply desires connection with you, answering all your questions, those who interact with ChatGPT. Notice that it started off as just sort of an answer and question sort of box. You threw a question in, it gave you an answer, and it was sort of this real blunt back and forth sort of serve and response exchange. Now, I'm sure everybody is noticing using Chat GPT, it's like you're talking to a librarian who is friendly in front of you, who as soon as you've gotten one answer, is always friendly, asking you, what else can I do for you? Can you turn that into a PowerPoint? Would you like me to expand on that? Do you want me to put that in third person? Do you want me to make that sound more conversational or more academic or more professional? Like it's this totally benevolent friend that now will do whatever you want. It's relationship. Because these companies know that if they can connect at that level, then you'll keep coming back. John, the number one use of artificial intelligence in the United States is companionship and therapy. Those are the those are the top uses of artificial intelligence. We deeply desire a connection. Right? And so now what we have is a connection in our pocket all of the time. Yeah, sure it can help me write emails. But if I'm lonely and I'm bored and I can just start chatting, and I can even upgrade John. If I'm a really lonely person and I desire a romantic relationship, you mean I can upgrade and now have an AI girlfriend that will send me text messages during the day, that will call my phone in a voice that sounds pretty human, that will even sexually, you know, send me content and all kinds of information, right? Now I've got something with me all the time that never complains, never fights back. You and I know real relationships are hard. There's drama, there's friction. Not in my AI girlfriend, right? So I I jumped a few levels there from using Chat GPT to write emails to AI girlfriends, but I think we need to understand the full spectrum of what AI is. Because when I say AI, what the average parent thinks of is that black sort of grayish screen with the chat GPT bar. That's what we think of immediately, because that's sort of probably what we use. But I need us to understand that that is the most benign form of AI that is available to humans today. When we look at all the other things that it can do, article after article. I'm participating in a round table in a couple of weeks that is being organized by a family, and this family's daughter, and this isn't confidential, this is all publicly in the news, so I'm not sharing anything that um is confidential here, but at their high school, there were two boys who got a hold of deep fake technology, which anybody could scroll on their phone right now and go to an app store and download a deep fake app which would take any photo of anybody and turn it into anything. And these boys took photos of girls from the school and turned them into explicit content and then shared it widely, hundreds and hundreds of pictures. And now there's all this trauma and harm that is being experienced by these young girls because even though it's fake, it doesn't feel fake, and it still neurologically and emotionally feels like real harm, non-consensual harm was done. So that's the downside. Just like social media has this here's what's good, here's what's harmful. You can see that exponentially greater than anything we've ever experienced, we have that same potential for good and for harm that is now present in these AI applications and websites that our kids have access to. So a lot was shared there. I know. I don't know if there's anything in that that you want me to expand on a little bit, but I need parents to what I say all the time, John, now is that we aren't taking AI seriously enough in the home. And the other phrase that I use is AI is the new porn talk. Like when I had to convince parents to talk about porn, now I'm trying to convince parents to talk about AI. Like AI is the new porn talk. We have to get it done. And in the same way that we as Gen X parents didn't have good models and our boomer parents know how to talk about porn, we definitely don't have good models to talk about AI. It's all new language, it's all new technology. So we've really got to do our homework as parents to know how to have those conversations. You know, AI, and a lot of technology is this way. I mean, AI to me is the epitome of 2 Corinthians, the angel in light that behind is evil. I mean, there is an evil behind this that we need to be very, very wary of. And I'm not I'm not all doom and gloom here, but I do believe, John, that we have probably about 12 months to figure this out. We have about 12 months to figure this out in terms of what's the church's posture going to be with artificial intelligence, what policy should be present in a church, should staff be using it to write and create content, that kind of stuff, right? Those should all be policy-driven decisions and policies that should be in place. I think the church has a responsibility to do that. Homes need to figure this out. Policies at the government level, we need laws to rein in, we need regulation to rein this in. I work with states on some of that. What does it look like to regulate AI chatbots? They shouldn't even be available, they should be age-gated because to your point, when they're eliciting this kind of I broke up with an AI response in our young people during this extremely vulnerable and valuable period of time where they're you know figuring out their relational templates, man, they should not be interacting with that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, we've got we have got to move fast. There's you know, about seven people on Earth right now that are directing the future of humanity. When you look at OpenAI, um uh anthropic, you know, Gemini, the large AI companies, you think about the power that has been given to them. And right, the news just last week with the model that was released by Anthropic, their AI um, so we have ChatGPT, which is the AI that's been put out by OpenAI. We have Claude, which is the AI that's been put out by Anthropic, that's the large um AI development company. And they released a model called Mythos, M-Y-T-H-O-S, and it is so powerful that they had to pull it back because it was discovering all kinds of vulnerabilities and software that have been present for 20 years that nobody ever knew. Basically, it could break every bank and company's systems, is what this AI could do. Imagine the upheaval that would take place if now all bank structures were at risk of some rogue AI in the hands of a bad actor, right? So we've got to figure this out. We've got to talk to our kids about what it means, that that same power is what's happening when they're typing in prompts, when they're using it for their homework, they are actually cognitively offloading their awesomeness. That we constantly go to AI, we atrophy our ability to have deep thoughts. This is science. There have been studies that show this, what happens over time. When you constantly ask to be prompted, instead of going to it with your ideas, what starts to happen is over time, you just have less ability to have deep, critical, big thoughts. Um, there's a phrase out there, John, that you know, it goes like this that the brain is like a muscle. Um, thinking is taking the stairs, AI is taking the elevator. So when you think about kind of neurologically what that means, we have to flex and use our brain. I'm so I speak a foreign language. I majored in Spanish and lived in Mexico and have done a lot of traveling overseas, and I know what it means to have knowledge that you don't use. Maybe I don't speak Spanish for a while, and then I go back to the country, I'm like, wow, that's a those are words I haven't used in a while. The brain is a little bit like a muscle where you go, I know they're in there somewhere, but I haven't flexed that part of my brain for a while. And I have to kind of get warmed up. And after four or five days there, my brain starts to wake up. Those old files of words, I'll have a dream in Spanish and go, oh yeah, now I'm waking back up to that. And that's just be a symbol, you know, kind of a signal to us as to what I'm talking about here. So um we need to take it seriously, parents. And not only in the book do I have resources, John, but even on social media, which I know is ironic, um, at Protect Young Eyes on Instagram and Facebook. But I released three just quick videos uh uh a month ago that was called AI and the Family, little two-minute videos that you can watch with your kids that explain certain aspects of AI. One is simply titled, you know, it it's a troll, it doesn't have a soul. Like, what does that mean? It's not a person. Treat it like a robot. You don't say please to Alexa, you're not nice to it, you don't give it a name, you don't ever say thank you. You boss it around. Why? Because it's sand and metal, it's silicone, it's a machine, right? And we don't personify it and give it a personality. And so these are just basic tips that I want our parents to be teaching. So anybody could find that, just go to any of our social media feeds and look for AI and the family. And as you kindly said, please buy Five Habits of the Tech Ready Family, which is the book that I wrote that explains a lot of these things too, so that we can have these conversations.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

And while you mentioned the the power that these these companies have, let's not forget also the power and authority that's been given by God to parents. As a parent, we we have authority to um to take on these issues within our own household and to implement safeguards, being educated, having the right resources to put in safeguards to protect ourselves and to protect our children. And so when we get in these conversations, yeah, it can it can quickly become overwhelming, understood, but always being reminding ourselves that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and he's coming back. So praise the Lord. So whatever new technology presents itself, whatever new adversary or new potential threat, let us rest in the hope of Jesus Christ and invite the Holy Spirit into our lives and into our homes to guide us and to be seeking out brothers and sisters in Christ, like me seeking out you, Chris, to say, hey, help me, help me to think about this so we as the body of Christ can be supporting each other and protecting and discipling our kids. Chris, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and looking forward to seeing what you are going to be doing here in the future, both at the state level, local level, and I'm sure I'll get to hear exciting things about new things you're doing in your home with your family. Thank you, John. Take care. Thanks, Chris. Thank you for listening to Discipling Kids Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe so you can receive the latest updates about new episodes and other events.