… this was not just about my 14-year-old son, it started with him, but it did not end there.

He came home and told me he only plays games with hand-drawn artwork and refuses to play anything that uses AI. When I asked who told him that, his answer was simple: an influencer, but many more. Then, not long after, he looked at an AI-generated image in an early, unofficial prototype trailer for my own game for barely a second and said: “This is AI. Nobody will play it.” He had never played the game. There isn’t even a finished game to play yet. That one image was enough for him to dismiss a project I have spent three years building the story, world, philosophy, and creative foundation for.

I turned to him and asked: “You’re learning to code yourself. Do you understand how difficult it is to code a game?” His answer was: “So don’t make one.”

I want to be honest about what that moment felt like.

I have spent three years on this. Three years of writing, building, and publishing two books already out, a third in the making, and now a game that carries the same world, the same characters, the same story I have poured everything into. I have spent money I did not have to spare. I have spent nights I will not get back. I made a prototype trailer, not a finished product, not a polished release, just an early visual to show what the world in my head looks like. And my son looked at it for one second, saw an AI-generated image, and decided the entire thing was not worth his time. Not the story. Not the three years. Not the world I built. Just the image. One second. Done.

That is not a child forming an opinion. That is a child executing a script someone else wrote for him. And that is what breaks my heart not that he judged it, but that he never even looked.

Then my 11-year-old daughter came in. She hadn’t even looked at the game. Yet she immediately told me: “No using AI, okay? You have to code and draw everything yourself. Otherwise nobody will play, okay?” I asked her who told her that. She simply answered: “Everybody.”

Two children. Two different ages. One had looked at a single AI-generated image and immediately judged the entire project. The other had not even looked at it, yet had already reached the same conclusion. Both of them were treating the same idea as if it were simply a fact: if you use AI, nobody will play your game. That is when I had to stop and ask myself: how did my children come to believe this?

What shocked me was not that my son dislikes AI. What shocked me was that someone had actively fed both of them the illusion that the games they play every day are created entirely by humans, with zero involvement of AI. This is not simply a debate about whether a game uses generative AI to create artwork. AI is now deeply embedded across modern game technology and platforms from matchmaking and skill ranking to bot behaviour, moderation, translation, data processing, and countless other layers of infrastructure. There is no meaningful basis for presenting a major modern game platform as if it were simply human-made and untouched by AI.

I have seen developers speak proudly about the time and effort they put into drawing their characters by hand, and I respect that work entirely. I have no intention of diminishing what human artists create. My concern is the context. When a developer says “We make our characters ourselves,” a child may reasonably hear that as “This platform does not use AI.” Those are two completely different statements, and if your words reliably lead a child to make that leap, it is time to reconsider not what you said, but how you said it. You may be speaking about one artwork, one team, or one creative process, while a child hears a statement about an entire technology platform. That distinction matters.

If you are a developer who has spent years creating characters and artwork by hand, tell children about that. Tell them about the artists, the skills, the time, and the craftsmanship involved because that is genuinely worth celebrating. But do not let a true statement about one part of a creative process become a misleading lesson about the technology as a whole. A modern platform can have beautifully hand-crafted artwork while also using AI in its development tools, moderation systems, translation services, or backend infrastructure. That is not a contradiction. That is simply how technology works.

My argument is not with my 14-year-old, and it is not with my 11-year-old. My argument is with the adults who put that thinking in their heads. When a child is told “This game is purely human-made” and then steered toward concluding “That game uses AI, so it isn’t worth playing,” this is no longer a matter of personal preference. A child is making a judgement based on incomplete and misleading information and that judgement was handed to them fully formed by an adult with a platform.

Teaching children to use AI with caution is something I fully support. Children absolutely should be educated about copyright, ethics, data, privacy, and responsible use of technology, that is genuine education. But feeding children the reflex to reject any game the moment they spot AI-generated images without ever opening it, understanding it, or knowing what it stands for is something else entirely. So is telling them that a game is “completely human-made and untouched by AI” as if that were even possible on a modern platform. Neither of these is AI literacy. Both are misinformation, and one of them is teaching children to practice prejudice without realising it.

I do not want my children to grow up blindly hating technology. I want them to be smart enough to ask the right questions: Where is AI being used, and what is it being used for? Who is making the decisions, and where does the data come from? Does it infringe on anyone’s rights? And ultimately, is the product itself actually good? That is genuine AI literacy, and it is what their generation actually needs.

My children’s generation was born into a world where they will live, learn, and work alongside AI. They need to develop the capacity to distinguish, question, and evaluate technology on its actual merits not inherit a script of hatred written by adults fighting their own technology culture wars. Those who hold influence over children carry a real responsibility for what they choose to feed the next generation. Stop using children as foot soldiers in adults’ technology wars.