I signed my child up for the summer camp for the least noble reason available. The holiday here runs six weeks, six weeks is a long time to fill, and I wanted one of those weeks to belong to somebody who was not me. My expectations were correspondingly modest: a field, some supervision, a child returned in the evening in roughly the condition she departed in. This is, I think, the standard parental transaction, and I entered into it without ceremony.

There is a particular fantasy that arrives with every new technology, and generative AI has inherited the most seductive version of it: the fantasy of the vending machine. You insert a prompt, you receive a finished thing, and somewhere in between the messy human labor of thinking has been quietly abolished. People talk about AI this way constantly — as a machine that does the work — and I have come to believe this is precisely the wrong way to think about it, in roughly the way that believing your stomach digests food for you is wrong. It does, technically. But you still have to decide what to eat, and that turns out to be the entire game.

There’s a book in my bathroom. Not in the bathroom in the sense that someone reads it there regularly — I put it there on purpose, adjusted its position three times over several weeks, and waited. My daughter is seven. She hadn’t shown much interest in this particular book. I’d mentioned it once, which is to say I made the mistake of recommending it, which of course meant she’d now rather read anything else.

There’s a peculiar torture humans have inflicted on machines lately: show an AI a stick figure of a running person drawn by a four-year-old, and ask it why those three wobbly lines mean “running.” The machine, which can identify a golden retriever from 2,000 pixels with 99.7% confidence, suddenly stammers.

Xiao Ran recently started using AI tools to assist with homework. Whether it’s writing reflections for a language arts class or researching historical events, she turns to ChatGPT for instant answers. If the results aren’t satisfactory, she switches to DeepSeek for additional materials from different angles. At first, she thought these tools were “learning miracles”—no more flipping through books or browsing endless web pages, and answers appeared to be at her fingertips.

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