Conversation starters: ages 14 to 18

Older teenagers are already using AI, and most of them are more sophisticated about it than we expect. The useful conversations now are about judgement: what the tool does to their thinking, what it does to their record, and what they would want a reader to know.

Four talks worth having

1. "Let's see what you're working on, and the prompt you used." Ask to see how they ask. A teenager who can steer a tool, question its answer, and check the result is doing something close to real research. A teenager who pastes the assignment and copies the output is not.
2. "What would you say to a teacher who asked how you used it?" This is the honesty question in a form they can answer. If they have a good answer, they are probably fine. If they do not, that tells you both something.
3. "Where could this follow you?" Portfolios, college applications, job applications, and scholarships may all ask about AI use. A shortcut taken at fifteen can be a strange sentence in an application at nineteen.
4. "What does it know about you, and what could it cost you?" Privacy for a teenager is about consequences, not rules: a chat log, an account tied to a real name, a photo uploaded and kept.

Two things that help

Be straight about your own use. Tell your teenager what you use these tools for and where you would not trust one. It stops the talk feeling like a search for evidence.

Distinguish help from hiding. Drafting, outlining, practising interview questions, and explaining a hard chapter are help. Producing work you present as your own thinking is hiding. Most teenagers accept that line faster than adults expect, as long as it is a line they can see and not a rule they have to guess.

A useful closing question

"If your work with this tool became public tomorrow, would you be comfortable?" It is a question they can apply to anything, including tools that do not exist yet.