“[I]t is a massively more powerful and scary thing than I knew about.” That’s how Adam Raine’s dad characterized ChatGPT when he reviewed his son’s conversations with the AI tool. Adam tragically died by suicide. His parents are now suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, based on allegations that the tool contributed to his death.
This tragic story has rightfully caused a push for tech companies to institute changes and for lawmakers to institute sweeping regulations. While both of those strategies have some merit, computer code and AI-related laws will not address the underlying issue: our kids need guidance from their parents, educators, and mentors about how and when to use AI.
I don’t have kids. I’m fortunate to be an uncle to two kiddos and to be involved in the lives of my friends’ youngsters. However, I do have first-hand experience with childhood depression and anorexia. Although that was in the pre-social media days and well before the time of GPTs, I’m confident that what saved me then will go a long way toward helping kids today avoid or navigate the negative side effects that can result from excessive use of AI companions.
Kids increasingly have access to AI tools that mirror key human characteristics. The models seemingly listen, empathize, joke, and, at times, bully, coerce, and manipulate. It’s these latter attributes that have led to horrendous and unacceptable outcomes. As AI becomes more commonly available and ever more sophisticated, the ease with which users of all ages may come to rely on AI for sensitive matters will only increase.
Major AI labs are aware of these concerns. Following the tragic loss of Raine, OpenAI has announced several changes to its products and processes to more quickly identify and address users seemingly in need of additional support. Notably, these interventions come with a cost. Altman made clear that the prioritization of teen safety would necessarily involve reduced privacy. The company plans to track user behavior to estimate their age. If a user is flagged as a minor, they will be subject to various checks on how they use the product, including limitations on late-night use, notification of family or emergency services in the wake of messages suggestive of immediate self-harm, and limitations on the responses they will receive when the model is prompted on sexual or self-harm topics.
Legislators, too, are tracking this emerging risk to teen well-being. California is poised to pass AB 1064, a bill imposing manifold requirements on all operators of AI companions. Among several other requirements, this bill would direct operators to prioritize factually accurate answers to prompts over the users’ beliefs or preferences. It would also prevent operators from deploying AI companions with a foreseeable risk of encouraging troubling behavior, such as disordered eating. These mandates, which sound somewhat feasible and defensible on paper, may have unintended consequences in practice.
Consider, for example, whether operators worried about encouraging disordered eating among teens will ask all users to regularly certify whether they have had concerns about their weight or diet in the last week. These and other invasive questions may shield operators from liability but carry a grave risk of exacerbating a user’s mental well-being. Speaking from experience, reminders of your condition can often make things much worse—sending you further down a cycle of self-doubt.
The upshot is that technical solutions or legal interventions will not ultimately be the thing that helps our kids make full use of the numerous benefits of AI while also steering clear of its worst traits. It’s time to normalize a new “talk.” Just as parents and trusted mentors have long played a critical role in steering their kids through the sensitive topic of sex, they can serve as an important source of information on the responsible use of AI tools.
Kids need to have someone in their lives they can openly share their AI questions with. They need to be able to disclose troubling chats to someone without fear of being shamed or punished. They need to have a reliable and knowledgeable source of information on how and why AI works. Absent this sort of AI mentorship, we are effectively putting our kids into the driver’s seat of the most powerful technological tool without even having taken a written exam on the rules of the road.
My niece and nephew are well short of the age of needing the “AI talk.” If asked to give it, I’d be happy to do so. I spend my waking hours researching AI, talking to AI experts, and studying related areas of the law. I’m ready and willing to serve as their AI go-to.
We—educators, legislators, and AI companies—need to help other parents and mentors prepare for a similar conversation. This doesn’t mean training parents to become AI savants, but it does mean assisting parents find courses and resources that are accessible and accurate. From basic FAQs that walk parents through the “AI talk” to community events that invite parents to come learn about AI, there’s tried-and-true strategies to ready parents for this pivotal and ongoing conversation.
Parents surely don’t need another thing added to their extensive and burdensome responsibilities, but this is a talk we cannot avoid. The AI labs are steered more by profit than child well-being. Lawmakers are not well-known for crafting nuanced tech policy. We cannot count exclusively on tech fixes and new laws to tackle the social and cultural ramifications of AI use. This is one of those things that can and must involve family and community discourse.
Love, support, and, to be honest, distractions from my parents, my coaches, and friends were the biggest boost to my own recovery. And while we should surely hold AI labs accountable and spur our lawmakers to impose sensible regulations, we should also develop the AI literacy required to help our youngsters learn the pros and cons of AI tools.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.