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I spoke with @joolia.bsky.social as she was writing this article. The Bluesky reaction on something AI wasn't a surprise to me at all, but it is interesting to be subject of it. Obviously I wasn't the article's main subject so our total convo got understandably boiled down to a couple quotes.

What people have deduced from those few sentences has been interesting to think on. When Midjourney first became capable of intelligible images when the story in the article took place, I only knew of one other person who even knew Gen AI existed, unlike today. I was in uncharted territory.

As mentioned in the article I was exploring it for work and trying to evaluate its impact on education (not mentioned is that I also serve on an edtech advisory committee at the national level for a school system). I knew in 6-12 months schools and parents were going to be blindsided by this tech.

In total my kids used it for an hour or so. Two tops. Usually in 10-15 minute spurts. Happened over the span of a couple months. They asked to generate pictures of unicorns eating cupcakes and the like. No LLM usage ever. To see calls for CPS is a bit amusing and a tad scary with my name public.

I know my parenting and while I make mistakes, my kids and I get lots of quality time away from screens. They ride horses, do gymnastics, and play piano. We spend most summer evenings on the trampoline for hours. We read together every night taking turns. Our home is a good safe place.

I share this because it's interesting to see how someone can build a picture of you in 2-3 sentences, and be absolutely convinced its true. Do I disagree with what some of the other parents are doing? Yeah (others feel that way about me obviously). Do I know them? Not in the slightest.

When Julia asked if I wanted to add anything I said that raising kids in this era of rapid technology change is really hard and it's OK if you don't immediately figure it out. We need deep charitability towards each other. The lack of is part of what draws people to chatbots in the first place.