I Work With AI Every Day. As a Mum, It Scares the Shit Out of Me.
I use AI every day.
Professionally, I use it to research, analyse, strategise, interrogate ideas, develop content, streamline processes and do things that, not very long ago, would have taken me considerably longer.
Personally, I use it too.
It has become embedded in how I organise, think, plan and sometimes just work through the endless logistics of life.
I think AI is extraordinary.
I also have a three-year-old son.
And AI scares the absolute shit out of me.
Both things can be true at the same time.
I don't have the luxury of opting out
I work in advertising and marketing.
There isn't really a version of my professional future where I decide AI isn't for me and carry on as though nothing has changed.
The industry is changing.
The way we research is changing. The way we create is changing. Search is changing. Media is changing. Production is changing. Agencies are changing.
And the people who learn how to use these tools well are going to have an advantage over the people who don't.
So I use them.
I learn them.
I experiment.
I think about how businesses should structure themselves around them.
I'm genuinely excited by what is possible.
But then I look at my son.
And suddenly I'm not thinking about next quarter's efficiencies.
I'm thinking about the next 20 years.
What does work look like for our children?
My son is three.
The jobs he might eventually have probably won't look like the jobs that exist today.
That's not necessarily frightening in itself.
Every generation has watched industries disappear and new ones emerge. Technology has always changed work.
But this feels different.
The speed feels different.
AI isn't automating one type of physical labour or changing one industry.
It's learning to perform pieces of work across writing, design, coding, analysis, research, administration, customer service, finance, law, marketing, medicine and countless other fields.
And it's getting better incredibly quickly.
So what exactly am I preparing my son for?
What skills do I tell him matter?
What does a career look like when machines can increasingly perform parts of the cognitive work we once assumed would always require humans?
I don't know.
And I don't think anyone honestly does.
I worry about more than jobs
Employment is actually only one part of what frightens me.
I worry about what it means to grow up never knowing a world without AI.
My generation learned to use the internet.
Our children may grow up learning to think alongside machines from the moment they're capable of asking a question.
What happens to curiosity when an answer is instant?
What happens to perseverance when difficult work can be completed for you?
What happens to creativity when you can generate almost anything you imagine in seconds?
What happens to critical thinking when an authoritative-sounding answer is always available?
What happens to our ability to sit with uncertainty?
To be bored?
To struggle with something?
To get something completely wrong and work out why?
Those experiences can feel inefficient.
But maybe some inefficiency is actually important.
Maybe struggling is part of learning.
Maybe boredom is part of creativity.
Maybe not knowing something is what makes us curious enough to go and discover it.
As someone who spends a significant amount of my professional life looking for efficiencies, that is an uncomfortable thing to admit.
Then there is the question of what's real
This might be the part I find hardest.
My son will grow up in a world where seeing something won't necessarily mean it happened.
A photograph isn't proof.
A voice isn't necessarily someone's voice.
A video isn't necessarily a record of an event.
Words may not have been written by the person whose name sits underneath them.
And misinformation isn't new.
Manipulation isn't new.
Propaganda isn't new.
But the ability to create incredibly convincing versions of reality at enormous scale is.
How do we teach children to navigate that?
“Don't believe everything you see online” suddenly feels laughably inadequate.
We're going to have to teach an entirely different level of digital literacy.
Not cynicism.
Discernment.
The ability to ask:
Where did this come from?
Who benefits from me believing it?
Can I verify it somewhere else?
Is this evidence, or does it simply look convincing?
Those might become some of the most important skills we give our children.
And yes, I see the incredible side too
This isn't an argument that AI is evil.
It isn't.
I've experienced too much value from it to pretend otherwise.
I can imagine extraordinary applications in medicine, accessibility, education, science and countless areas we haven't even conceived of yet.
I can imagine my son having access to personalised learning that previous generations could never have dreamed of.
If he's fascinated by space, history, engineering, dinosaurs or some obscure subject I know absolutely nothing about, he'll potentially have access to a tool capable of exploring it with him endlessly.
There is something amazing about that.
And perhaps AI will remove enormous amounts of mundane work and allow humans to spend more time doing things that actually matter.
I hope so.
But optimism doesn't require blindness.
I think we need to stop pretending you have to pick a side
There seems to be a strange binary conversation around AI.
You're either excited about it or frightened by it.
You're embracing the future or resisting progress.
You're an AI evangelist or an AI sceptic.
I don't think reality is that neat.
I can believe AI will create extraordinary opportunities and believe it presents serious risks.
I can use it every day and question how dependent we should become on it.
I can help businesses adopt it and believe businesses need far stronger processes and safeguards around how they use it.
I can teach my son how to use AI and deliberately make sure he learns how to function without it.
Those aren't contradictions.
They're probably the responsible position.
So what do I teach my son?
I keep coming back to this.
If I can't predict what technology will exist when he's 10, let alone when he's 20, perhaps preparing him for a specific version of the future is the wrong goal.
Maybe my job is to build the things technology can't easily give him.
Curiosity.
Critical thinking.
Empathy.
Resilience.
Confidence.
Creativity.
The ability to communicate with another human being.
The patience to learn something difficult.
The confidence to question an answer, even when it sounds convincing.
The ability to change his mind when the evidence tells him he should.
And, importantly, an understanding that technology is a tool — not an authority.
I want him to know how to use AI.
I don't want him to need AI in order to think.
There is a difference.
I don't know what his future looks like
And maybe that's the hardest part for me as a parent.
We spend so much time trying to create certainty for our children.
We plan.
We save.
We teach.
We protect.
We imagine the adults they'll become and try to give them what they'll need when they get there.
AI makes that future feel unusually difficult to picture.
But perhaps my responsibility isn't to predict it.
Perhaps it's to raise a human capable of navigating whatever arrives.
I'll continue using AI.
I'll continue learning about it.
I'll continue helping businesses work out how to use it better.
I'll probably be even more embedded in it five years from now than I am today.
And I'll continue being amazed by what it can do.
But when someone asks whether the future of AI worries me?
Yes.
It scares the shit out of me.
Because I'm not only looking at it as a marketer wondering what it can do next.
I'm looking at it as a mum wondering what kind of world my son is going to inherit.
And I think we should be able to talk honestly about both.
