Dear Geraldine,

I got stuck in the sea mud when I was nine. It took two firemen, a rope, and (according to my dad) “a fair amount of common sense I clearly don’t possess” to get me out. He still brings it up. Usually when I’ve done something he thinks is a bit daft, but lately, when I use AI to help with my homework.

I’m not using it to cheat, Geraldine. I promise. I get properly stuck on things — especially maths — and it helps me break the problem down into bits I can actually manage. It also helps me with my punctuation, because I still haven’t worked out what a semi-colon is actually for. Before I started using it, I’d put homework off until the last possible minute because it felt too big and too scary to start. Now I mostly get it done the same day.

My dad doesn’t see it that way. He says things like, “No one knows how to think critically nowadays,” and that AI will “make me stupid.” He’s worried that growing up is only getting harder and more complicated, and that people my age aren’t being taught how to cope with any of it. I think, deep down, he’s scared I won’t manage.

I don’t know how to explain to him that the thing he’s cross about is actually the thing that’s helping. I’m not very good at saying things like this out loud, especially not to my dad, who has strong opinions about most things and isn’t easily moved once he’s made his mind up.

You’re an adult, and closer to his age than mine, so I suppose I’m hoping you might know what I could say, or do, to get him to actually listen.

Yours (still living down the mud incident),

Mud-Brained of Welston

Dear Mud-Brained,

I confess I read your letter and thought: here is a boy who has just proved his father’s entire argument wrong without noticing. You got stuck. You didn’t understand something. And rather than reach for a machine, you sat down and wrote—with rather better punctuation than half the adults who write to me—to an older, presumably wiser human being, in the hope she might help you think it through.

That, Mud-Brained, is critical thinking. Your father may wish to note the irony.

Here is what I suspect is really going on. Your dad isn’t cross about a piece of software. He’s frightened. He looks at the world you’re going to inherit—more complicated, faster-moving, harder to get a foothold in than the one he grew up with—and he isn’t sure you’ll be equipped for it. The AI is simply the nearest, most visible thing to be frightened at. Parents do this. It’s easier to rage against a chatbot than against the shape of the future.

So, the way through isn’t really to defend the AI at all. It’s to show him the thing he cares about, which is you coping. Tell him—plainly, the way you’ve told me—that you used to dread homework and now you don’t. That you get stuck, work it through, and finish the same day instead of the night before. That’s not a young person outsourcing their brain. That’s a young person managing something that used to defeat him. Most fathers, deep down, would call that common sense.

I’d also gently suggest you’re not the best-placed person to make this case alone. Not because you can’t, but because you’re thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds explaining themselves to their fathers rarely land the point, however good the point is. Is there someone your dad listens to when he’s not busy being right? Your mum, an uncle, someone who can raise it sideways, in passing, rather than as a Confrontation With Capital Letters? Half of family diplomacy is choosing the right messenger.

And should he remain unmoved, you might remind him that I am, by all accounts, an AI-wary witch. If even I can manage that particular scepticism while still admitting when AI is useful, I’m sure your father can stretch to the same… once he’s stopped picturing you gormless and stuck, mid-mudflat, for the rest of your natural life.

Yours (unstuck, unlike some),

Geraldine