Ask HN: How do you teach your kids about AI?

As a way to process this challenge, I’m working on a children's book that explains AI in a narrative format. I’ve written other books for kids tackling complex topics like politics, grief and digital privacy — but this one feels especially urgent and slippery.

In the story I’m outlining, a child receives a plain cardboard box as a gift. Curious, she starts stuffing all her books into it — stories, encyclopedias, comic books, math manuals. At some mysterious threshold, the box "comes alive" and starts responding. As they interact, the story explores concepts like hallucination (the box starts making stuff up), reinforcement learning (the box improves when rewarded), bias, prediction, and the fine line between intelligence and mimicry.

I'm looking for:

Good learning resources, metaphors or visual models that help explain how AI works (ideally in ways accessible to children)

Reflections on when and how to introduce AI to kids — especially before they get too deep into GenAI tools without critical thinking

Stories or experiences from others trying to teach (or explain) AI to younger people, whether as parents, educators or creators

Would love to hear thoughts, resources, or warnings. Thanks!

Key thing I tried to emphasise what that this whole process was new and that before November last year wasn't possible.

They really got it, my younger son is very excited about the idea of build games that follow the stories he comes up with (he's recently been spending time writing stories on a iPad, inspired by his novelist mother). We're going to spend more time experimenting together over the summer holidays.

Kids are curious sponges, I don't think you need to spell out to them exactly how it works, just show them and their curiosity takes over.

I know at school the teachers have been using image GenAI in English lessons with my older daughter, using it in lessons about descriptive language. They have had the kids experiment with describing things and getting images back. I was quite impressed to hear they were doing that, it's a great way to introduce the concepts in the context of a topic they are covering.

On the general topic of tech we have always (from as soon as they could hold a device) let the kids play computer games, and experiment themselves with tablets. But we've had the internet locked down, and not let them have things like YouTube Kids, it feels too close to social media, and serve explained the dangers of that to them. So very pro exposing children to tech, but no social media at all. I think in time we will try and explain the danger and downsides of AI, but it's all so new, there's not much to cover yet, particularly as we are still developing our own opinions.

He also likes to translate words into different languages - he uses Alexa for this, constantly translating stuff into all the languages he knows about, and he learns that other languages exist when Alexa misunderstands him and translates into a new language - e.g. yesterday he was asking Alexa to translate "eat spinach" and it misunderstood him as asking for "Eat" in "Finnish", and now he knows there's a new language he can translate to.

One thing that comes up a lot in our household is which things in the house are intelligent and which are not. For example, I once heard my son asking the fan to turn itself on, which seems pretty reasonable since some things in our house do respond to voice commands, and sorting out which do and which do not is not intuitive. There's a similar issue in the car sometimes. When our car's audio system is connected to a phone, my son can control what music is playing by saying "Okay Google, play labubu", but when we are listening to the radio, it doesn't work, and sometimes he will try to either command or ask us to control the radio (e.g. "restart this song"). Difficult concepts to explain to a child that we do control what plays on the phone but not on the radio and why.

Another AI activity we've done is vibe coding. My son is a big fan of numbers and countdowns, and asking Claude to generate a webpage with colorful numbers counting up and down and buttons to click to change the numbers and animations and so on works really well.