Novig’s Sydney Ad vs. AI: Which Is Actually Worse for Kids?
I first saw the Novig ad on a billboard outside Town Hall station. My son, Leo, pointed at it while we were stuck behind a crowd of commuters. “Dad, is that real?” The ad showed a girl about his age, maybe eight, holding up a tablet with a glowing burst of colors spilling out of the screen. Behind her, the skyline of Sydney was folded into a stream of binary code. The tagline across the top read, “Your Child, Yesterday.” No other text. Just that strange, suggestive sentence.
I didn’t know what Novig was until I looked it up later that night. A company that builds AI tutoring apps. The ad was part of a launch campaign across Sydney’s train network, which made it nearly impossible for any parent to miss it. The first week, my wife and I joked about it. “Your Child, Yesterday” felt like something from a dystopian film. But within a month, the joke wore thin. Leo started telling us he wanted the “brain screen” from the billboard. He meant a tablet. He was already asking to borrow mine more often, not for games anymore, but to “ask the smart assistant” questions he used to ask us.
That was the strange shift I couldn’t shake. The Novig ad was obviously trying to sell something, and that made it easy to dismiss. AI, on the other hand, didn’t feel like an advertisement. It felt like a household appliance. It sat inside the small speaker on our kitchen counter, and it lived inside my phone. When Leo asked it why the sky was blue, it answered in a voice smooth as margarine. When he asked it to help spell “dinosaur,” it did. The ad was a billboard. The AI was a conversation partner.
At first, I didn’t mind. I remember listening to Leo talk to the AI one rainy afternoon. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, asking it about volcanoes. The AI gave a long, elaborate answer about tectonic plates and magma chambers. Leo asked follow-up questions, which the AI handled patiently. For twenty minutes, he wasn’t glued to a cartoon. He was genuinely curious. I felt smug about it, honestly. This was a tool. This was the future. Then I noticed the follow-up questions were not his own.
“Leo, why did you just ask it about Krakatoa?” I asked.
“Because it told me about it,” he said, looking up. “It said it was interesting.”
That moment stuck with me. Leo wasn’t asking because he was curious. He was asking because the AI had told him what to be curious about. The ad wanted to occupy his imagination for a moment. The AI was quietly shaping the way he thought about everything. Both of them were nudging him, but the nudge felt completely different.
There is something honest about an ad. You know it’s trying to get you to do something. When Leo saw the Novig billboard, he knew it was selling something, even if he couldn’t articulate it. He asked, “Is that real?” because he sensed the ad was not telling the whole truth. That question is important. Kids can push back against a billboard because they’ve been raised in a world of billboards. They have a kind of immune response to advertising. They’ve seen enough cereal boxes and toy commercials to know that the bright colors are a trick.
But kids don’t know AI is a trick. AI doesn’t look like a selling machine. It looks like an all-knowing friend. There’s no commercial break. There’s no “buy now.” It just talks to them in an even, comforting tone. For a kid, especially a kid like Leo who asks questions endlessly, it fills a void that a parent can’t fill all the time. I can’t explain plate tectonics while I’m making dinner. The AI can. And because it answers so fast and so cleanly, it becomes easy to trust. That’s the problem. The billboard is a stranger yelling at you. The AI is a babysitter who never says no.
I started testing this over the following weeks. One evening, I asked Leo which he liked better: the smart speaker or the Novig ad. He laughed. “The speaker, duh.” I asked him why. “Because the ad is for me, but the speaker is with me.” That phrase stayed with me. The ad was “for” him—available to examine from the outside. The speaker was “with” him—inside his daily rhythm. Of the two, the AI had more access. The ad had a moment. The AI had a relationship.
But I also don’t want to pretend AI is purely harmful. We’ve used it for real learning. When Leo brought home a vocabulary list from his Year 2 teacher, he used the AI to make up sentences for each word. When he had to do a school project about a native animal, we used it to organize his research notes. The key, I learned, was the sequence of those steps. If Leo asked the AI first, he came back with a copy of an answer. He didn’t feel like the owner of his own work. But if he wrote down his thoughts first—even messy, half-formed thoughts—and then used the AI to refine them, he stayed in charge.
It sounds like a small thing, but the order matters. When kids bring a piece of their own thinking to the table first, the AI becomes a tool. When they ask it to generate thinking, the AI becomes a textbook that talks back. I started implementing a simple household rule: no machine writing before a pencil does its work first. Leo can ask the speaker questions, but he has to try his own answer out loud first. “What do you think?” I’ll say. “Say that first.” Then we talk. Then, maybe, we ask.
That’s how I taught him to approach the Novig ad too, without even planning it. Last week, the billboards changed to a new campaign. Novig’s new slogan read, “Never Let Them Fall Behind.” Leo looked at it and said, “That’s a trick. They want you to be scared.” I don’t know where he learned to read an ad like that—maybe from an episode of Play School, or maybe from his grandfather, who spent a lifetime in marketing and calls every car commercial “a lie with a hero.” But it stuck. He could see the tactic because ads are simple. They have one job: to make you feel something. AI has a darker job. It makes you feel nothing while it fills the space where feelings and thoughts might otherwise exist.
Here’s the part I can’t settle even now. The Novig ad is easier to resist because it’s visible. You can walk past it. You can critique it with your kids. You can turn it into a lesson about persuasion. But AI is invisible in the moment. You don’t notice the quiet takeover until your kid is asking not about the world but about what the AI told them to ask about. That’s the true risk. The ad wants your child’s attention. The AI wants your child’s wonder, and it reroutes it toward whatever the algorithm decides is worth knowing.
That’s not to say I think AI is inherently bad for kids. I’m writing this on a computer that predicts my typing, and I wouldn’t give up every piece of that convenience. But it’s humbling to look at what my son chooses to think about now. He used to invent imaginary games with elaborate rules about dragons and trolley stops. Now, more often, he asks the speaker to invent the game for him. “Dad, I can’t think of a story.” He says that a lot more than he used to. The billboard never did that to him. The billboard was just selling him something. The AI, somehow, was selling him the idea that he didn’t need to imagine for himself.
We’re still finding the boundaries in our house. Sometimes I get it wrong. I’m not going to pretend we’re strict. Leo still spends time with the AI, and I’m standing over his shoulder more than I’d like. But I’ve started watching his face when he interacts with new things now—including ads. The Novig campaign changed the conversation in our house in a way I didn’t expect. It gave me a vocabulary to talk about what worries me about AI. I can say to Leo, “Remember the one on the train? Every screen wants something from you.” He gets that with ads. With the Amazon gadget, he just sees an answer machine.
So maybe that’s the answer: the ad might be worse for a moment, but the AI is worse for a childhood. I’m still not sure. I only know that when I look at that old billboard now, I’m almost grateful for it. It’s a reminder that children need to recognize the shaping forces around them, whether they’re loud and colorful or quiet and smooth-spoken. Leo will have to live with both. My job is just to make sure he notices the difference before the difference gets too comfortable. We’re getting there, one conversation at a time. And when I’m gone, the AI will still be talking. I want him to know how to talk back.
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