I recently sat down with a friend for coffee. She began telling me about her 3rd-grade daughter, who had recently started using Chat GPT as a “homework helper”. At first, ChatGPT seemed like a miracle — her daughter was spending less time on homework, more time on ballet and with family, and was even learning the important skill of how to “prompt AI”. It turns out, though, my friend’s little girl “began relying on AI more and more… for almost everything. She began “copying and pasting answers, skipping steps, and not even trying to figure anything out herself!”
My friend felt like this unchecked reliance on AI had led her daughter to completely lose her intellectual spark and her sense of creativity—“I wanted her to become resourceful, but instead, she just became lazy!”
Recent reports (RAND 2026) show this phenomenon is widespread. As students increasingly use AI as a homework tool, they risk losing critical thinking skills—or not even learning them in the first place. Today, teachers are frequently seeing students who are unable to reason without a prompt, and who completely resist the “friction” of struggling—where the real learning happens. AI provides us all with fast answers, but it also has the potential to cost us our critical thinking skills, and perhaps even the desire to think for oneself.
Kids who outsource their problem solving skills to AI will become adults who are unable and unwilling to form independent thought. I believe we can change that, and without banning tech or vilifying AI.
Fallacy Hunters teaches kids why it is so important for us as humans to be able to think for ourselves. Book 1 introduces kids to the idea of “logical fallacies”—errors in reasoning that sound good, but are actually false or misleading. Kids learn how rewarding and empowering it is to be able to spot—and counter—these dangerous tricks both online and in real-life.
In Fallacy Hunters, kids learn how to ask the right questions, how to recognize bad reasoning, and how to strengthen their own arguments—essential human skills in the age of AI.
AI can help us do great things, but it is our own minds that need to do the hunting.
More Posts:
“I Let My Kid Use AI for Homework… Then I Saw What It Was Doing to Her Brain…”
How can we empower our kids in the age of AI?
Jane Petito | Co-Creator of Logic Lion
