Novig’s Sydney Ad and AI: Which Is Worse for Children? A Parent’s Take
The bus shelter on George Street was the last place I expected to see my daughter grown up. The ad showed a girl of about twelve, wearing the same small scar above her eyebrow as my eight-year-old, but with an older face, sharper cheekbones, and a navy suit that no child would ever choose. In the corner of the ad was the word Novig — a tech company I’d never heard of — and a line about seeing your child’s future self.
“Mum, that’s me!” my daughter said, pulling at my sleeve.
She wasn’t scared at first. She laughed, the way she laughs at a funny mirror in a fairground. But then she looked again and went quiet. The girl in the ad wasn’t just similar. She had the same slight gap between her front teeth, the same way of tilting her head. It was close enough that I felt a cold wave cross my own chest before logic caught up.
“Sweetheart, it’s not you. It’s a picture made by a computer.”
“But it looks exactly like me.”
I didn’t have a better answer. The man beside us at the bus stop stared at the ad, then at her, then away. The bus came, and we got on, but the question lingered.
I looked up Novig later that night. Their Sydney campaign was for an app that uses AI to generate an image of your child as an adult. You upload a photo, and the algorithm “ages” it. The ad itself was all smiles and clean design, a child waving from a school uniform into a graduation gown. The problem wasn’t the intent. It was the effect.
For three days, my daughter asked if she would really look like that when she grew up. I said no, the app was just guessing, making things up. She frowned and asked, “How do you know?” And that was the moment I stopped being a parent with an answer and became a parent with a question of my own.
I didn’t know. The image was too convincing. If I hadn’t known it was AI, I would have assumed it was a photo of her from a few years in the future. And that thought — that I could be fooled by a machine — was more unsettling than any advertisement.
Now here is the question that’s been circling in my mind since that bus stop: which is worse for children, the ad itself, or the AI that created it?
On the surface, the ad is easy. It’s a physical thing, a piece of printed plastic in a metal frame. I can walk my daughter past it, or cross the street, or write a complaint to the transport authority. It will come down in a few weeks, replaced by something for a phone company or a car. The ad is temporary. It has a face, a location, a date. I can point to it and say, “That is fake.” That’s manageable.
The AI behind it is not manageable. That same technology is already inside every app my daughter uses, every video she watches, every voice that speaks to her from a screen. It can create images of children in situations no child has ever been in. It can copy a voice saying words that were never spoken. It can make a face that looks like her and put it anywhere. The ad was designed to sell an app. But AI can be designed to fool, to manipulate, to unsettle.
That is the thing that keeps me up at night. The ad was a symptom, not the disease.
Here is what I mean. When my daughter looked at the Novig ad, she was confused. That confusion lasted a day, maybe two. I could hold her hand, explain filters and algorithms, watch her face relax when she understood. The ad was a moment of discomfort, but it was visible. I could see it, name it, deal with it.
The AI that generated that face doesn’t let me do that. It works in the background, across a thousand apps, across the entire internet. I can’t show my daughter every instance of a fake picture because I can’t identify them all myself. I can’t tell her “this is AI” when I don’t know it’s AI. The technology is so good that I might nod at a photo and say “nice picture” without ever questioning whether it was taken or created.
Since that bus shelter moment, I’ve started doing something simple at home. I pull up images on my phone — a cloud, a cat, a street scene — and I ask my daughter, “Real or AI?” She’s surprisingly good at it. She looks at the edges, at the fur of the cat, at the way the light hits the clouds. Sometimes she’s right, sometimes she’s wrong, but the habit of questioning is there.
We also talk about voices. I showed her a short video of someone I know saying a sentence they never actually said. It was clumsy, easy to spot, but the point landed. I explained that people can make videos where a face moves and a voice speaks, and none of it has to be real. She nodded, then asked if she could go back to painting. That was fine. I didn’t expect a deep conversation. I just wanted her to know that seeing is not always believing.
There are practical adjustments I’ve made too. Her tablet now requires a second confirmation before following links from unknown apps. Not because I think she’ll be tricked today, but because I want the pause to be automatic. I’ve also started saying “maybe” instead of “yes” when she asks whether something online is true. That’s strange for a parent. We want to be confident. But with AI, confidence is exactly the wrong response.
I don’t have a clean answer to the question. The ad was worse in some ways because it was personal. It used a face that looked like my daughter’s to sell a product. It made her feel seen by a machine. That is eerie in a way I can’t fully explain. It turns a billboard into something that feels like it’s looking back at you.
But AI is worse because it doesn’t need a billboard. It lives in the background, in the small spaces between running errands and checking messages. It can create a thousand Novig ads, each one more sophisticated, harder to spot, more tailored. My daughter will spend her life moving through a world where the boundary between real and generated is blurry. The bus shelter ad was just the first time she noticed the blur.
A few weeks later, the ad came down. We walked past the empty frame, and she didn’t mention it. I was grateful, but I knew the quiet wouldn’t last. Next time, the picture might be of her, or of someone she loves, and it won’t be framed in a bus shelter. It might come through her phone, forwarded by a friend who believes it’s real.
So which is worse? The specific ad or the general technology? I think the answer is both, and neither. The ad is a moment; the AI is a lifetime. I can handle moments. I can talk about them, sit with her through the confusion, offer a warm hand and a simple explanation. The lifetime part is harder. No parent can shield a child from a technology that’s woven into everything.
For now, I’m doing what feels possible: asking questions, looking closely, letting her see me pause before I believe. That’s not a solution. It’s just a habit. Still, it’s a habit that began with a strange ad in a city shelter, and for that, I’m almost grateful.
We’re still figuring it out. She may ask me in a month whether a video is real, and I might not know. We’ll look at it together, discuss the chances, and sometimes be wrong. That’s the world we’re in. The ad has come down, but the AI hasn’t.
That’s what I carry with me when I walk her to school now. Not the image of her grown up in a suit, but the knowledge that I still have a lot to learn before I can teach her what’s truly real.
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