Homework Is Free Now. That Was Never the Point.
A machine can now copy most of what school calls "achievement" — the essay, the book report, the practice worksheet — in seconds, for effectively free. But homework was never about the essay. The essay was the excuse; the point was what writing it forced kids to practice: judgment, taste, discipline, following through. The better question for parents isn't "how much AI should my kid use" — it's "how much dependency is it creating?"
I grew up in the 90s. Finished college by the 2010s. Today I want to talk about school stuff.
What Was Homework Actually For?
First, an idea:
A machine can now copy most of what school calls "achievement."
The five-paragraph essay. The book report. The practice worksheet.
A model produces all of it in seconds, for effectively free.
(And honestly, a smart kid who figures out how to steer the chatbot will always fool the AI detectors. Good for those kids.)
Whatever a machine can copy is getting cheap... fast.
So it's worth asking: what was homework actually for?
I'd argue it was never about the essay. The essay was the excuse.
The point was what writing the essay forces punk kids to practice: judgment, taste, discipline, following through, being the kind of person others trust.
A machine can't copy any of those.
Which means our job as humans shifts: focus on the traits the tasks were secretly building, instead of the tasks themselves.
Is Screen Time the Right Question?
Millennial parents ask the screen-time question a lot: how much [insert technology] should my kid get access to?
I think that's the smaller question.
The bigger one: how much dependency is [insert technology] creating?
Just like a kid who flips on the TV after school (or Pokemon Blue, like me) instead of going outside to play is building a habit, a kid who asks the AI for X, Y or Z before he thinks about it is building a habit too.
Same with the kid having AI do his homework.
But here's the flip side. A kid who grades the AI's output is building the right muscle — and that will enable him to survive and thrive into the future.
Meanwhile the kid who takes ChatGPT's responses as canon will probably not.
Same technology. Same minutes spent in the chat.
Completely opposite results.
So the goal, at least in how I approach AI with parenting: raise a kid who can stand in front of infinite generated options and decide — what's true, what's good, what's worth his time.
The machine generates. The human decides.
I'm raising a decider, not a follower.
How Do I Build the Deciding Muscle?
The most important AI skill a kid can build is catching the machine being wrong: confidently, fluently, horribly wrong.
So I turned it into a game. It's called Omni-Bot 3000 — a prompt that turns any chatbot into an enthusiastic robot who answers your kid's questions about their favorite topic and gets about half of them wrong on purpose.
Your kid is the Fact-Checker. They approve or correct every answer. When they catch the bot, it thanks them, gushes a little, and re-processes. When they approve a wrong answer, the bot gently confesses — because sounding sure isn't the same as being right.
It takes five minutes to start, and you can play it right here or copy the prompt into your own chatbot.
Pretty simple stuff. But a good way to introduce kids to questioning the responses of a robot — and it's the same muscle homework was secretly building all along.
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If you play Omni-Bot 3000 with your kid, I'd genuinely love the box score: the topic they picked and how many wrong answers they caught. Pokemon kids: I want to hear from you especially.