My Parents Are Addicted to AI — What That Looks Like at Our Dinner Table
The first time I really noticed it was over a question about whether to plant tomatoes next to basil. My dad had his phone in his hand before my mom finished the sentence. “Let me just ask,” he said, and within seconds he was reading out a paragraph about companion planting, complete with soil pH recommendations and a warning about something called allelopathy. The tomatoes didn’t get planted that weekend. We just sat there, listening to the internet tell us what we already could have figured out ourselves.
That’s been the pattern for a while now. My parents, both in their late forties, have quietly outsourced their thinking to an AI assistant that lives in their phones. It started innocently enough—recipe recommendations, opening hours, directions. But somewhere around last winter, it crossed a line. Now it’s the first stop for every question, every argument, every minor decision. What’s the fastest route to my aunt’s house? Ask the AI. What time should we leave? The AI knows traffic patterns. Is it okay to reheat rice? The AI has a definitive answer from a food safety website, and my mom recites it like scripture.
I’m sixteen, and I’ve become the designated family skeptic. I didn’t ask for this role. It just sort of happened because I’m the one who still remembers what it’s like to have a question and not have an immediate answer.
Last month, my dad planned our entire vacation itinerary through the AI. Not just the flights and hotel—the actual schedule. It told us which restaurants to visit, what time to arrive at the beach to avoid crowds, and which historical sites were “underrated gems” based on aggregated internet opinions. There was no space for wandering, no running into something unexpected, no looking at a map and deciding together that, actually, the dinosaur museum looked more fun than the hall of mirrors.
When I said that out loud, my mom got defensive. “It’s just making things easier, sweetheart. We have more time now.”
I don’t think she’s wrong. But I also don’t think easier is the same as better.
Here’s a small example that sticks with me. My little brother—he’s nine—was doing a school project about the water cycle. He asked my mom how rain formed. Instead of sitting with him, drawing some arrows on paper, or even saying something like, “Let’s think about what we know already,” she turned to her phone. She found a three-minute animation and handed it over. He watched it twice and got the gist. It was efficient. And I watched her miss the chance to watch his face light up when he made the connection himself.
I’m not saying parents shouldn’t use AI. I’m not saying it’s evil or that kids should never see it. But when it becomes the default answer for everything—even things where the process matters as much as the answer—something in the family fabric gets thinner.
The bigger problem I’ve noticed is how it’s changed their conversations. When my parents disagree now, they don’t argue it out. They each go to the AI. Last week they had a twenty-minute conversation about the best way to remove a stain from a wool sweater, which was just both of them reading back what their respective AI chat apps had told them. There was no back-and-forth, no “try this, Grandma always did that.” There was just a cloud service arbitration.
I’ve started doing something small but deliberate on my own. When they ask me a question, if I know the answer, I try to answer it aloud, even if there’s a pause while I think. I don’t pull out my phone. I don’t even offer to look it up. It’s a tiny rebellion, maybe, but I feel like someone in that house should still practice the skill of recalling things from their own head. Gym class was bad for me, but not as bad as watching my dad hesitate before telling me what time it was, because his phone was in the other room.
What actually helped, though, wasn’t resistance. It was a boredom-induced accident. One rainy Saturday, the wifi went out at our house for about four hours. No internet, no chat assistant, no streaming. My parents paced around like they were in withdrawal. My mom literally stood by the router and refreshed her phone a couple of times, as if that would help.
Then my dad sat down at the kitchen table with an old road atlas we keep in the car. He started looking for a route to a lake we haven’t visited in years. My mom got out a stack of recipe cards, the ones my grandmother left her. She made soup from memory, adjusting the seasoning by taste, not by a comment thread.
We talked. Not about anything important. But we talked without one of us checking the AI mid-sentence to see if what we said was factually correct. It was brief. It was ordinary. And then the wifi came back and everything kind of slid back to how it was.
I’ve gotten a little more direct since then. When my mom opens her phone to ask what temperature to cook chicken, I’ll say: “What did you do last time?” Sometimes she’ll actually remember. Once or twice she’s said, “I don’t know, honey, I just let the app decide for me.” That’s the honest answer. And I’ve learned to just sit with it, because she’s not going to change overnight. Neither of them will.
What I’ve learned through all of this is that it’s not really about the AI. It’s about who gets to be the answerer in the household. When your parents turn to a machine for everything, you start to feel like there’s no one to turn to. There’s no grandma’s memory, no dad’s funny story about a missed exit, no mom’s particular way of folding the towels that she insists on even though it takes longer. All those little human quirks get flattened into a single, efficient response.
We’re not a family in crisis. My parents are attentive, they love us, they still make dinner and ask about homework. But I don’t think they’re making as many small decisions with us anymore. They’re checking with an algorithm instead of checking with themselves, or with me and my brother.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. There’s no triumphant moment where I smashed the phone or the family held a meeting and banned chat assistants from the house. We’re still dealing with it every day. Just last night, my dad pulled out his phone to ask what time the lunar eclipse started. I already knew—it was in two hours, at 8:47 exactly. I told him. He raised an eyebrow and said, “Oh, you looked it up too?”
“No,” I said. “I learned astronomy last semester. I read it off a school worksheet. Some of us still remember where we heard things.”
He just looked at me for a second. Then he put the phone face-down on the table and we went outside and watched the sky do its thing in real time. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just quiet.
I’ll take it.
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