What my kids taught me about the AI divide

0:00Hi, listeners. It's Rana. The Masters of Scale team recently announced over a dozen speakers joining the lineup for this year's Masters of Scale Summit, and I'm so excited to be able to share them with you. Matthew Prince, Ivan Zhao, Amy Webb, Reid Hoffman, and more will take the stage this October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. I'm so excited to be there. Will you join me? Together, these speakers embody the Summit 2026 theme. Our agency now. Applications are open, but spots are limited. So apply now at mastersofscale.com slash pioneers. That's mastersofscale.com slash pioneers.

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1:34yeah we're ready oh we're just like we're just talking about all sorts of random like that's just happened when you're with your family yes yeah i'm surprised that neither of you have said if you're worried about ai and loneliness because that's one of my main concerns. Really? Do you have any friends at your school who have like AI boyfriends and girlfriends? Oh my God, do you? No. Oh my God, do you? Yeah. I don't. I don't. But a couple of weeks ago, none of you guys were home. And so I decided to have dinner with Gemini. What does that mean? No way. Oh my God. Okay. Well, no. I'm like, wow, maybe I just have not been as present of a sister as I should be.

2:15I know. You know what I mean? I feel so guilt. Like mom guilt. Yeah, I feel sister guilt. I'm just like, it is not a sentient thing that's able to like opine, right? Hi, everybody. I am so excited for today's episode. Around the end of May, I wrote a LinkedIn article called I'm an AI scientist. My daughter refuses to use AI and I'm OK with it. And it's really about how my two kids sit on the opposite ends of the AI spectrum and what my role is as a parent. So the article kind of went viral on LinkedIn. It had over 150 ,000 views, many, many comments and reshares. And I thought it would be fun if I brought the kids on the show to react to the article and talk about how they use AI and how they don't.

3:05I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:21For our episode today, it is my pleasure to welcome my two favorite human beings in the world, my two kids, Jana and Adam. Welcome to Pioneers of AI. Hey, everybody. Excited to be here. I feel like the podcast is always recorded from our living room, and so it's exciting to kind of be on the other end. Yeah, these four people are like, okay, guys, I'm recording from 2 to 3 p.m. Nobody, like, not allowed to use the kitchen and you're not allowed to, like, do this and that. So anyway, a lot of people know about you because I post about you a lot and talk about you a lot on the show. But I thought it would be fun to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to everyone.

3:59So Jenna, how about we start with you? Yeah, for sure. So I graduated from Harvard a year ago. I studied food anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. What is that? So food anthropology is really thinking about the world, everything from politics to economics, to the way in which people connect and understand one another through food. And so I kind of ask questions like, wow, how can we learn about someone else's life through food? Or if we ask questions about, I don't know, recipes that they hold near and dear to their heart, what kind of different perspectives can we learn about their lives through that?

4:32For the past year, I co-founded and built Menara, which is a culture salon and evening cafe. that's really centered around bringing people together. And so convening people for art workshops, poetry readings, book talks, film screenings. And we hosted 80 plus events, all of which were completely packed. And I think it was a really kind of special way to see that people are really hungry for in-person connection. And I know we're going to jump into why I think that is and kind of how that all fits into the AI world. Can you say something that maybe people have not heard me talk about you like something that's I don't know that's uniquely you that we don't know about oh I mean you might have heard this already but I really love to cook and I love to bake and you may already know this but I am a horrible cook yes and then every week I have been cooking from a different country and so I pick kind of a country I go out in the Boston area to a specialized grocery store I buy all the ingredients and then I come home and make it and so So I've done...

5:36That's been so fun, you guys. It's like the best. It's an international food night. Mommy, you missed Chinese this week. It was really good. It was really good. We've done Thai, Honduran. Somalian. We've done Somalian, Filipino. Yeah. Yeah, guys, you have to tell us. Yeah. Give us recommendations. Yeah, give us recommendations. What should we do next? I know. That's fun. All right, Adam. How about you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm Adam. I'm a rising senior in high school at Milton Academy. And I mean, I have a lot of different interests. I'm really into history. especially the history of Egyptology.

6:07I'm really into math, into AI. A couple of weeks ago, I was at the National Speech and Debate Tournament. And so I recorded one of my speeches. And right after the round, I got out. The first thing I did was I gave that recording to my AI agent. And I told it to analyze my vocal intonation and give me feedback before the next round. I've been teaching financial literacy to immigrant families and kids. and I've been using AI to help modify the materials so that it's more easily understandable and accessible and engaging. So I think these are just many different types of ways where like AI can make you better.

6:41Can you talk about like your interest in Egyptology and AI? Because I think that's like such an interest, like it's not an obvious marriage. Yeah, for sure. Thank you, yeah. So just for some context, last summer I was working at the American University in Cairo. Go AUC. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Some connections there. But I was searching through these archives of these Egyptian Egyptologists and Egyptian workmen on excavation fields, like their diaries, the ledgers from the excavations. So basically imagine 15 boxes completely disorganized, page after page of diary notebooks or ledgers or letters between different men and not the best condition at all.

7:27And so I was searching through them. I was trying to answer my question of how the Egyptian Antiquity Service reflected Egypt's nationalization project. and it was really difficult, especially because although I'm Egyptian, I can't really read Arabic, especially not like handwritten Arabic from that time period. And I discovered that although if you try to use an AI model like Google Gemini or Chachupiti, if you just go onto the website and try that, you're going to get a ton of hallucinations because it doesn't have the archival context, right? But what I realized is that if you're able to feed all of the historical and archival context to the AI, like you would give it to a person who's trying to understand the archive, it will be able to translate and transcribe these documents much more accurately.

8:15And so I decided to sort of scale this up and I built a platform, which I'm calling Tarath, which means heritage in Arabic, that allows a researcher or an institution to upload all of their archival context. And what it does, it basically builds a system prompt where then you can upload your documents and then get more accurate transcriptions and translations. And I've been using it for myself because now I'm able to actually like search through all of these different Arabic documents that I would have never been able to look at. And so that's what I've been really getting into this summer. And I hopefully plan to grow it and help some institutions digitize their archival collections like AUC.

8:55And so, yeah, we'll see what happens. The TLDR of all of this is that you use AI for absolutely everything in your life. Like, it's just like there. You have your AI agents doing everything for you. So I have a printout of the article. Here's what we're going to do. Have you read the article? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I want you to just highlight things that stand out to us. Yeah, stand out to you. All right. I'm an AI scientist. My daughter refuses to use AI, and I'm okay with it. Yeah, I started by throwing you under the bus. Yay. All right. I spend most of my waking hours inside the AI economy.

9:33My advice, delivered with the conviction of someone who has spent her career on it, yes, I have, has been consistent. If you're a young person, or any person, lean in, be playful, and don't get left behind. My son, Adam, is what people now call AI native. When I watch him work, I see exactly the future I've been describing on stage. My daughter Jenna graduated from Harvard last spring, where she studied food anthropology. Sometimes the parent in me worries about her. And sometimes the investor in me does too. I worry especially about what it means for her as a young woman to opt out of AI at a moment when AI is creating massive economic opportunity.

10:17The people who will benefit most are the ones building it, funding it, and learning to wield it fluently. What I've started to think is that the AI enthusiasts and the AI skeptics need each other. I'm not sure how that story works.

10:33All right. What's stuck with you guys? Sure. Can I go first? You want to go first? Sure. You can go first. So the first paragraph you say, if you're a young person or any person, lean into it, be playful, and don't get left behind. Okay. And I really like that. I think you're hinting at what you, the conclusion you come to at the end of the article where it's like lean in, right? And like explore. And I actually think that both Jenna and I are leaning in our own different ways. While my version of leaning in is like playing with the tools, exploring, applying it to all the different aspects of my life.

11:11I think Jenna's leaning in, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's, she's leaning in in her own way of leaning into this human side. And that also applies to AI, right? But it's like the other pole of what I'm doing. Well, actually, let me ask you both. Like, what is your perspective on AI? I'm definitely the AI skeptic of the group. I think that... But what does that mean? Yeah. So I think that there's like really great promise in AI. And I feel like we talk about it a lot. And I think it's really obvious, like listening to all the different things that Adam is doing and has done with AI. You know, it feels like AI has made him a lot more efficient and creative in really cool and important ways.

11:49But I think that I'm really, really worried about the ways in which I think AI is limiting people's ability to critically think. So I think about the writing process, for example, which for me is really, really important to the work that I do, but is also something I really love doing. I was a writing tutor at Harvard and I remember when kind of chat GPT first came out you know there was a whole school of people that were saying wow for some of the international students that we see at the writing center or some of the folks who've come from maybe like lower income schools that don't necessarily have super strong writing programs perhaps chat GPT is going to be the thing that solves that and kind of like equalizes the playing field in terms of writing and unfortunately I think that AI has the potential to do the opposite which is that I think when people kind of rely on AI for writing, there's a lot of like shortcuts that kind of come out.

12:39And I think what's so important about the writing process is that it is a process, right? And so through writing, you're able to develop your own ideas, make new connections. And that struggle or that iteration goes away, I guess. Yeah. And I think that also part of the process of writing is like articulating your own thoughts and like really like kind of almost like toiling with your own thoughts and then being forced to like put those on paper and like work through the iterative process of making the best draft possible, right? And I think that that ability to communicate with other people and to form one's own thoughts is really hindered when you go immediately to AI to answer a question or to write an essay.

13:19At the writing center, people would often tell us like, oh, can you just write this paragraph for me? Or, oh, can you just write my thesis for me? And the answer was always no, because the point of us as writing center tutors wasn't to get them an A on an essay or to kind of help them cut corners, but it was actually to equip them with the tools and the skills necessary to write well. Because in the long term, that's what matters. It's not about one essay or one answer, right? It's about your ability in the long run to really, you know, think critically by yourself and put those thoughts and be able to do something really important with with your own thinking and so i think that's something that i worry ai is is curtailing so how that manifests in our family is sometimes adam and i will be sitting on the couch i don't know using ai to i don't know iterate on a draft for a email or something and jenna will walk by and she's like why use your brains yes yeah because i think that you don't realize it but the more and more I mean, there's a lot of data that's now coming out to say this, too, but the more you offload to AI, the more that your brain forgets how to do some of these tasks in the first place, right?

14:29And there's many times where, like, in the process of writing an email, you realize, oh, my goodness, like, I should also mention this. Or, like, I actually had no idea because of my own research that, like, this person went to this school. Let me mention that person. And I think all of those connections are really, really important. And I do think that the more that AI kind of, you know, proliferates and really like becomes embedded in almost every part of our lives, I think the more that our brains are going to become important again, right? Because everyone now has access to AI. And so I think that brains are going to go back to being the differentiating factor.

15:00And I worry that everyone kind of immediately embracing AI will not have their brains to rely on anymore. Do you want to respond to that? Yeah, I feel like I'm torn, right? Because I see what Jenna's saying. If everyone has AI at their disposal, then the people who will differentiate themselves will be the people with the most creative ideas and the most creative brains. But I also feel like the potential of me plus AI is objectively higher than just me, right? Me without AI, I don't think I would be able to do everything that I do. And I think AI like improves the quality of my work and expands the possibilities of my projects.

15:45And so I kind of wonder like, okay, sure, like the brain probably will be the differentiating factor, but I don't see a world where people are not collaborating with AI on an everyday basis, however they do that. And so I don't really know the answer, but I'm torn with what you're saying. I kind of wonder, like, what is the next generation of students in general? Like, how will they kind of relate to honesty and integrity and, like, those questions when, like, AI is so hyper-available and pervasive in the classroom and beyond? Well, what do you both think counts as cheating and what is okay? I mean, obviously, it depends on the, like, class expectations.

16:30And I do think that, like, guidelines. Or work. or work expectations but i personally do feel like passing off ai work as your own is a form of cheating i think that the line is a lot more blurry when you're using ai to brainstorm generally i think ai is a bad brainstormer like you should again use your own brain and like what about editing what about editing i think editing can also be like somewhere in the middle but i do think that like the editing process again is so important to writing an iteration and so i do think if it's a writing assignment i would totally say editing is cheating so i think i mean right now in the current state of the world especially school if you're submitting something that you used ai in the process of making and you're not disclosing it that is like cheating in in school rules right just just like looking at school rules that's cheating and similarly used to be like even with school, like if you had a parent read over your essay or a friend, like you're supposed to also disclose that because the whole point is that you're like learning, right?

17:35And it's your work and you need to be evaluated on your learning and growth. So yes. Right. But I think in the ideal world, that won't be a thing anymore. I think people will start to judge only by quality of work and AI will just be used as a tool like Grammarly that will help you upgrade the quality of your work, right? Like if I have bad punctuation and I use Grammarly, it's probably not cheating, right? If I'm bad at doing multiplication tables in my head and I need to do some sort of really complicated real world problem about math and I use a calculator, that's not really cheating. Like in math, if you use a calculator, no one really cares that you disclose that you used a calculator, right?

18:10I think the same thing will happen to other subjects like English where, okay, if you used AI but your work is still at the quality, like maybe you're not going to have to disclose that you used AI or maybe you will disclose but it won't be like supposedly cheating, you know? Well, one thing that I have come to realize actually through these conversations at home, and now, you know, we're sharing this with the rest of the world, is I am very, obviously my investment thesis is AI that unlocks human potential and amplifies and augments human abilities. So in a way, it's what you said, like the combination of human and AI is really powerful.

18:51And that's kind of what I'm trying to unlock with the founders I back. But you also, Jenna, made me realize that there's almost an antithesis that in this world that is just so like busy with AI, maybe there's an opportunity to back the analog world and whether that is like, you know, human-based experiences, human-based connections. So I'm kind of trying to like sort through that thesis too. Right. Like I wonder if a world where there's more AI also means that there's more space for human connection. Right. Yeah. But I guess something I was thinking about too, with kind of thinking about this idea of like being playful, right, with AI.

19:36I also do think that kind of this like framing of like being playful maybe doesn't necessarily like address some of the harmful impacts of AI, right? Because it just feels like very like fun. You can just play with AI as if it's like a sandbox, right? And some of them even are called sandboxes. But at the same time, you're not necessarily cognizant of maybe the negative impact it's having on your own kind of critical cognition, but also on the world at large, whether it's like climate or whatever else. And so I do think it's kind of interesting because I agree, like, there is a way maybe to do human plus AI and do it in a somewhat ethical and kind of positive way, but I also think that kind of how we frame the question also does matter.

20:21I'll be right back with more of my conversation after this quick break.

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21:19what are your concerns about ai who wants to go first well one thing that just came to mind when adam was talking is because you were saying that you kind of you feel like it does make you more efficient in kind of all aspects of life and one thing i really struggle with is i feel like i am a good writer. And so I can tell when like Chad GPT or Claude outputs some really bad writing, but like I'm not a good mathematician, right? And so I actually can't tell, like if I have Claude do some math, like I can't really tell, like, is this, has it done it correctly? Has it not? And I worry that people who haven't spent kind of like years in a field or maybe are going to Claude or Chad GPT for various tasks aren't necessarily able to discern if the output is good or bad, right?

22:05And I think that discernment is so important. And I think if you're like teaching someone how to write, right, like think about fifth graders who are learning to write for the first time, I do think that there's something kind of lost in being immediately able to turn to an AI chatbot and having the AI chatbot kind of do it for them and them not necessarily being able to recognize kind of what quality the output is. I think this is a very important point. We actually talked about this at work too. There was one time a few months ago when Anthropic went down, like it was down, and we have Cloud Code doing stuff for us.

22:43And it kind of, we had this realization like, okay, we happen to know how to do the job. So if AI goes down, it's fine. But in the future, if you don't know how to do the work, to your point, like can you discern if it's good quality or not? And if something happens, what's the backup plan? And that's such a that's such a good point yeah what concerns you about ai sort of adding on to that like recently i've been looking at my life and like other people's lives as like how likely are they for their whole life to be replaced by ai for example i look at jenna and like she's very low on that scale i don't think she's not going to be replaced yeah i don't mean i don't think yeah no good for you i don't think ai is ever going to be able to replace you because you do so many things that impact like real lives and it's like real impact but then sometimes i look at my own life, I'm like, okay, I'm doing these assignments for school.

23:33I'm writing these emails. Like everything I do is kind of on the digital world. How easy would it be for me to run an agent that just runs my entire life with like, would anyone notice? And that's kind of scary to me. Like the idea that AI, maybe I'm like not that far away from AI being able to replace me. That's scary. And I think it's a signal that maybe I need to change some things in my life. But can I say something? I don't think AI can replace you. Like, I think you are thinking about your function as a human being in a very narrow, like, production-focused way. And I'm like, no, like, AI can't replace the dinner table conversations we have.

24:10Or like, AI can't replace—

24:25It could act like it's thinking and it could act like it's thinking like me. And then who would know? Do you think you'd be able to tell? I totally think I'd be able to tell. You'd be able to tell. Adam versus Adam's AI. I don't know. I don't know about the scare. Like, I can see how that can be scary to you. But I also feel like a little bit sad, too. Yeah. Yeah. It's very sad. Also, have you made any changes to your life based on that realization? I don't know. I mean, the summer started. So I've been trying to spend more time with my friends or like get out, play paddle or like DJ. I mean, these are all things that I don't think would be replaced by AI.

25:01But yeah, maybe it's like a mindset shift, like you were saying, like viewing in a different way. Not to think about yourself as just like production. Yeah. Do you have other concerns about AI? Like, I don't know. I mean, a related one I think is, so I'm a year out of college. And so I do think I have like, obviously a lot of friends who, you know, are in jobs and are similarly kind of like genuinely worried if they're going to get replaced by AI and also folks who are in the job market whose applications are being screened by AI. And I think it is like a really scary time to be kind of looking for a job and thinking about like some of these questions and have them not feel so existential, but really like up close and personal.

25:42Let's talk about your job process. Yes. Because that's been like really interesting and fascinating. So you have friends who have applied to, I don't want to say hundreds of jobs, but like definitely like 50 plus jobs. And the way they're able to do this efficiently is they literally have AI, like auto, auto find jobs and auto populate jobs. And then you're taking a very different approach. So tell us about your approach. And I'm not judging which approach works better because we're still in it. So no judging there, but I guess we'll find out soon. We're going to find out. I mean, my approach has very much been to find job opportunities that are aligned with, like, my values and my interests and spend a lot of time thoughtfully curating answers to job application answers and cover letters.

26:35Yeah, like, really a lot of time putting thought and kind of humanity into the applications. And I think, at least thus far, like, I think that the folks kind of reading the applications have appreciated the fact that it is a human on the other side. And I think they've been able to see that. Yeah, like you haven't applied to like tens of jobs, like a handful of jobs, but you've gotten it's like a hundred percent get to first interview rate, which is pretty impressive. And I don't know if you'll get the job. Yeah, but I also do think it's reflective of the jobs themselves. Like they're not seeking, I think, maybe just because of the industry or they're not seeking like folks who are applying in mass to AI.