How kids feel about AI, in their own words

I’m studying engineering, and my life goal is to innovate technology that will help as many people as I can. The way I see it, AI isn’t inherently good or bad; that’s decided by the people using it. It’s already being used for lots of good. Just think about how it helps people with personalized education and more accessible medical diagnoses.

So far, the biggest project I’ve worked on with AI is called Next Voters. My teammates are more on the technical side, and I’m working on scaling. Right now, we’re focusing mostly on city councils as well as states. Our system turns dense, hundred-page documents into a headline and a few plain-language bullet points in your inbox. And everything is cited, so you can click straight to the actual policy to learn more. The information comes to you, instead of you having to remember to go search or prompt for it.

One AI agent finds official government sources for a given city or state—the council website, the proposed bills, the meeting transcripts. Another verifies they’re real and credible; another scrapes them every week for the latest updates; another sorts them into categories like civil rights, immigration, and economics; and the last one writes our weekly newsletter.

The project’s goal is to reduce the barriers to democratic participation—to make sure anyone, regardless of race, gender, income, or education level, has an easy way to get the information they need and then think critically about how they want to use it. We made it because right now, it feels as if most teens aren’t very engaged. I was in English class when the war in Ukraine came up and someone said, “There’s a war going on?” That gap, plus all the emotionally charged social media misinformation that gets promoted because it earns the most clicks, makes me nervous for the next generation of voters.

We don’t want AI to think for people; we want to use it to disperse knowledge. In other words, we want to deal people the cards and let them play them however they want, but we have to make sure they have the cards in the first place.