What kids actually think about AI, and a mouse experiment with no males

A new interview project set out to ask kids aged 10 to 18 what they actually think about AI, and the answers ran more skeptical than expected, according to a piece published this week by MIT Technology Review.

Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara, founding editors of Anyway, an independent print magazine for kids aged 9 to 15, went looking for stories about cheating, inspiration, and deepfakes. What they found instead was a lot of ambivalence. A February 2026 Pew Research Center survey backs up the general pattern: 57% of US teens have used chatbots to look up information and 54% for schoolwork help, but only 12% report using AI for emotional support, meaning teens are over four times more likely to reach for AI on mundane tasks than on anything approaching a harmful or high-stakes use.

“AI isn't the solution to our problems. I'm afraid it's going to be the end of creativity and critical thinking.”

— Winter, age 17

The kids interviewed didn't land on one shared opinion. Remy, a 16-year-old coder from New York, compared the technology to an early transportation breakthrough: "I think AI right now is sort of like the first car or the first airplane. It's interesting but crude." Hazel, 17, described her feeling toward AI in a single word, "Angry," and her advice to other kids was blunter still: "Just stop using it." Others drew narrower lines. Sylvia, a 10-year-old artist from Michigan, said she's fine with AI helping her study as long as it doesn't hand her answers outright, and Evelyn, 13, said flatly that she never wants AI acting as her doctor. A 17-year-old inventor from Ontario, Krishiv, took the opposite view of the technology's trajectory, arguing that as agentic AI draws billions in investment, human judgment and self-direction are becoming more valuable skills, not less.

The same newsletter edition carried an entirely separate story: a preprint posted to bioRxiv by researchers Takashi Ishiuchi and Shogo Matoba, of the University of Yamanashi and the Riken BioResource Research Center in Japan, describing a technique they call Y-CUT. The method uses CRISPR to cut out a specific section of the Y chromosome during early cell division, an approach the researchers say was inspired by natural sex-reversal biology observed in the Okinawa rubble goby fish. Applied to male mouse embryos and even to cryopreserved male cells, it produced female clones carrying a single X chromosome instead of the usual XX pair. Those clones grew up healthy, and, notably, fertile: they mated and produced healthy offspring of their own.

“There's a fixed concept in our scientific field that we need both females and males for reproduction. I think we could change this concept.”

— Takashi Ishiuchi, University of Yamanashi

• Pew data: 57% of US teens have used chatbots for information, 54% for schoolwork, only 12% for emotional support
• Kid reactions to AI ranged from outright rejection ("Just stop using it") to cautious, task-specific acceptance
• Y-CUT technique: CRISPR removes a Y-chromosome segment, converting male mouse cells into fertile XO female clones
• The mouse-cloning findings remain an unreviewed bioRxiv preprint, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal

The two stories share little on the surface, but both point to the same editorial instinct: talk to the people actually doing the work, whether that's a 10-year-old explaining exactly how much help she wants from a chatbot or a lab in Yamanashi proposing a reproductive workaround for endangered species reduced to a single sex. Neither story resolves cleanly. The kids don't agree with each other, and the mouse research still needs peer review before anyone treats Y-CUT as more than an early, promising result.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.