Yesterday I sat down with three groups of high school students at a health and wellness event organized by Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Desert — a Coachella Valley institution that has been doing one-to-one youth mentoring since 1997. The venue was the Classic Club in Palm Desert, right next door to Acrisure Arena, which felt appropriately symbolic. A lot of big energy in a small amount of space.

I was there as a volunteer, invited to have a conversation about the responsible and ethical use of AI. Not to lecture. Not to present. Just to share my worldly wisdom and expert understanding of this new technology (I made that last part up).

I went in with plenty of assumptions. I mean, I remember being that age. I also spend a lot of time reading about how young people are using AI — what the research says, what the headlines claim. So yeah, I thought I had a reasonable map of the territory.

Boy, was I wrong.

I thought I would hear more about AI companionship. If you spend any time reading the research around young people and AI, that is one of the loudest storylines out there — students forming attachments to AI, talking to it late at night, naming it, leaning on it emotionally, preferring it over real-world friends.

I also thought I would hear more about how AI shows up in their social lives. Friend groups, group chats, identity, relationships. The messy human places where technology tends to settle in.

That is not what happened.

Across all three sessions, what came through most clearly was something more grounded and, in its own way, more revealing. For most of these students, AI lives primarily in one lane; School. Homework. Assignments. Getting unstuck. Getting through school. Not as a life co-pilot. Not as a companion. As a practical utility.

That does not mean they are not curious. They are. It does not mean the deeper uses are not happening somewhere in private. They probably are. But in the room, what felt safe and socially acceptable to admit was school use. Homework help is a normal confession. Loneliness is not.

Almost every student mentioned a tool I had never heard of: Gauth — an AI-powered homework helper apparently circulating among students right now. First time it came up I did what any self-respecting AI guy would do. I asked what it was. They told me. By the time the second group sat down and someone mentioned Gauth, I was already nodding. Oh yeah, Gauth. I know Gauth. Known about it for at least forty-five minutes now.

AI is not arriving to them as abstract disruption. It is arriving as friction reduction. And when the friction disappears, so does the practice. When AI removes the effort of thinking something through, looking something up, figuring it out on your own — that is not just convenience. That is muscle you are not building.

And for teenagers still figuring out how to think, that cost is real even if it does not show up on the receipt right away.

The most striking moments of the day did not come from the students who were deep into AI. They came from the ones who were not — and had thought carefully about why.

In the first group, a young woman said she was not using AI because she did not want it giving her the answers. That she'd rather try and figure it out on her own. After all, isn't that what school was for?

In the second group, a young man said something I was still turning over driving home. He would rather be behind without AI than out in front with it if it meant giving up his own learning process and his creativity.

Not reactionary. Not technophobic. Thoughtful. Both of them were already sitting with a question that students, educators, employers, and parents are all going to be wrestling with for years. Where is the line between help and replacement? When does support become dependency? When does convenience quietly eat away at confidence, judgment, and originality?

These kids were feeling it instinctively. Without anyone framing it for them. Some of them were already asking, in their own language, how much of themselves they should be willing to hand over.

That is not a rejection of AI. That is an early signal of agency. And it was the most encouraging thing I heard all day.

In the third session — the most talkative group by a wide margin — the conversation drifted past AI entirely and into the broader digital environment. Phones. Social media. Being online in general. What it actually feels like. What it costs.

The students started talking about how, without all of it, they imagined spending more time together in person. Libraries. Coffee shops. Each other's houses. Just being somewhere together without a screen mediating everything.

So I put something in front of them.

Imagine a big red button. One button. It switches the internet off. Do you press it or do you leave it alone?

I expected a split room. Some ambivalence. Healthy teenage debate about everything the internet gives them.

After a brief acknowledgment of the good stuff, most of them said they would press it.

Yikes.

Now — they were almost certainly conflating the internet with social media, AI, online pressure, and the whole digital atmosphere. Young people do not always make the tidy categorical distinctions adults make. To many of them it is all one environment. The online world. Fair enough.

But even with that caveat, the answer was something. What they were not saying was that they hate technology. What they were saying, in their own way, was that this thing has taken something from them.

And one of the young women put it simply and exactly right. They wanted to be present. Not offline. Not anti-technology. Not nostalgic for some analog past they never actually lived in. Just present. In the room. With each other. Without the low-grade hum of notifications and feeds and AI and everything else competing for the same finite slice of their attention every single waking hour of the day.

That is not a radical idea. It used to just be called a Tuesday.

That may have been the enlightenment of the whole day. A room full of teenagers, given a hypothetical off switch, choosing relief over access. Not because they want to go backward. Because the always-on digital atmosphere may be costing them more than the adults around them realize.

And then came this moment.

A young man in that final session brought up a friend. Several times. Someone he knew who was basically overdependent on AI. Using it for everything. Sharing too much private information with it. Giving away too much of their own thinking and judgment to it. You could truly feel his genuine concern and pain over this friend.

The conversation kept moving. And then he hesitantly, almost sheepishly, admitted that this friend was not a friend at all.

It was his mom. And she was addicted to AI.

Silence.

We spend enormous energy talking about protecting young people from technology. About screen time and AI safety and making sure kids do not go too deep. But there, in that room, was a teenager carrying a much harder and more private question. How do I make sense of an adult I love who seems lost in something I am still figuring out myself?

That is not a technology problem. That is a human one. And it is coming for all of us — regardless of age, regardless of how much we think we know, regardless of how confidently we walked into the room.

I went in thinking I knew the shape of the conversation. The research pointed one way. The room pointed somewhere else entirely.

AI for this group is still mostly about school survival. The emotional and social uses may be happening but they are not what anyone wants to say out loud in front of peers and an adult they met twenty minutes ago. The students who were holding back from AI were not behind — they were asking one of the smartest questions available to them right now.

Before we wrapped I asked one more question. When it comes to AI and technology in general — are the adults in your life ahead of you, behind you, helpful, or just adding to the confusion? Bigs and Littles. All three sessions. The answers came fast and without much deliberation.

Behind. Confused. Well-meaning but not particularly useful. Nobody said ahead. Nobody said helpful without immediately qualifying it.

A few of them laughed. Not meanly. Just honestly.

And the digital world, taken as a whole, may be exhausting this generation in ways that adults across the desert — and everywhere else — are significantly underestimating.

Yesterday I sat down with three groups of high school students at a health and wellness event organized by Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Desert — a Coachella Valley institution that has been doing one-to-one youth mentoring since 1997. The venue was the Classic Club in Palm Desert, right next door to Acrisure Arena, which felt appropriately symbolic. A lot of big energy in a small amount of space.

I was there as a volunteer, invited to have a conversation about the responsible and ethical use of AI. Not to lecture. Not to present. Just to share my worldly wisdom and understanding of this new technology (I made that last part up).

I went in with plenty of assumptions. I mean, I remember being that age. I also spend a lot of time reading about how young people are using AI — what the research says, what the headlines claim. So yeah, I thought I had a reasonable map of the territory.

Boy, was I wrong.

I thought I would hear more about AI companionship. If you spend any time reading the research around young people and AI, that is one of the loudest storylines out there — students forming attachments to AI, talking to it late at night, naming it, leaning on it emotionally, preferring it over real-world friends.

I also thought I would hear more about how AI shows up in their social lives. Friend groups, group chats, identity, relationships. The messy human places where technology tends to settle in.

That is not what happened.

Across all three sessions, what came through most clearly was something more grounded and, in its own way, more revealing. For most of these students, AI lives primarily in one lane; School. Homework. Assignments. Getting unstuck. Getting through school. Not as a life co-pilot. Not as a companion. As a practical utility.

That does not mean they are not curious. They are. It does not mean the deeper uses are not happening somewhere in private. They probably are. But in the room, what felt safe and socially acceptable to admit was school use. Homework help is a normal confession. Loneliness is not.

Almost every student mentioned a tool I had never heard of: Gauth — an AI-powered homework helper apparently circulating among students right now. First time it came up I did what any self-respecting AI guy would do. I asked what it was. They told me. By the time the second group sat down and someone mentioned Gauth, I was already nodding. Oh yeah, Gauth. I know Gauth. Known about it for at least forty-five minutes now.

AI is not arriving to them as abstract disruption. It is arriving as friction reduction. And when the friction disappears, so does the practice. When AI removes the effort of thinking something through, looking something up, figuring it out on your own — that is not just convenience. That is muscle you are not building.

And for teenagers still figuring out how to think, that cost is real even if it does not show up on the receipt right away.

The most striking moments of the day did not come from the students who were deep into AI. They came from the ones who were not — and had thought carefully about why.

In the first group, a young woman said she was not using AI because she did not want it giving her the answers. That she'd rather try and figure it out on her own. After all, isn't that what school was for

In the second group, a young man said something I was still turning over driving home. He would rather be behind without AI than out in front with it if it meant giving up his own learning process and his creativity.

Not reactionary. Not technophobic. Thoughtful. Both of them were already sitting with a question that students, educators, employers, and parents are all going to be wrestling with for years. Where is the line between help and replacement? When does support become dependency? When does convenience quietly eat away at confidence, judgment, and originality?

These kids were feeling it instinctively. Without anyone framing it for them. Some of them were already asking, in their own language, how much of themselves they should be willing to hand over.

That is not a rejection of AI. That is an early signal of agency. And it was the most encouraging thing I heard all day.

In the third session — the most talkative group by a wide margin — the conversation drifted past AI entirely and into the broader digital environment. Phones. Social media. Being online in general. What it actually feels like. What it costs.

The students started talking about how, without all of it, they imagined spending more time together in person. Libraries. Coffee shops. Each other's houses. Just being somewhere together without a screen mediating everything.

So I put something in front of them.

Imagine a big red button. One button. It switches the internet off. Do you press it or do you leave it alone?

I expected a split room. Some ambivalence. Healthy teenage debate about everything the internet gives them.

After a brief acknowledgment of the good stuff, most of them said they would press it.

Yikes.

Now — they were almost certainly conflating the internet with social media, AI, online pressure, and the whole digital atmosphere. Young people do not always make the tidy categorical distinctions adults make. To many of them it is all one environment. The online world. Fair enough.

But even with that caveat, the answer was something. What they were not saying was that they hate technology. What they were saying, in their own way, was that this thing has taken something from them.

And one of the young women put it simply and exactly right. They wanted to be present. Not offline. Not anti-technology. Not nostalgic for some analog past they never actually lived in. Just present. In the room. With each other. Without the low-grade hum of notifications and feeds and AI and everything else competing for the same finite slice of their attention every single waking hour of the day.

That is not a radical idea. It used to just be called a Tuesday.

That may have been the enlightenment of the whole day. A room full of teenagers, given a hypothetical off switch, choosing relief over access. Not because they want to go backward. Because the always-on digital atmosphere may be costing them more than the adults around them realize.

And then came this moment.

A young man in that final session brought up a friend. Several times. Someone he knew who was basically overdependent on AI. Using it for everything. Sharing too much private information with it. Giving away too much of their own thinking and judgment to it. You could truly feel his genuine concern and pain over this friend.

The conversation kept moving. And then he hesitantly, almost sheepishly, admitted that this friend was not a friend at all.

It was his mom. And she was addicted to AI.

Silence.

We spend enormous energy talking about protecting young people from technology. About screen time and AI safety and making sure kids do not go too deep. But there, in that room, was a teenager carrying a much harder and more private question. How do I make sense of an adult I love who seems lost in something I am still figuring out myself?

That is not a technology problem. That is a human one. And it is coming for all of us — regardless of age, regardless of how much we think we know, regardless of how confidently we walked into the room.

I went in thinking I knew the shape of the conversation. The research pointed one way. The room pointed somewhere else entirely.

AI for this group is still mostly about school survival. The emotional and social uses may be happening but they are not what anyone wants to say out loud in front of peers and an adult they met twenty minutes ago. The students who were holding back from AI were not behind — they were asking one of the smartest questions available to them right now.

Before we wrapped I asked one more question. When it comes to AI and technology in general — are the adults in your life ahead of you, behind you, helpful, or just adding to the confusion? Bigs and Littles. All three sessions. The answers came fast and without much deliberation.

Behind. Confused. Well-meaning but not particularly useful. Nobody said ahead. Nobody said helpful without immediately qualifying it.

A few of them laughed. Not meanly. Just honestly.

And the digital world, taken as a whole, may be exhausting this generation in ways that adults across the desert — and everywhere else — are significantly underestimating.

If we are serious about preparing the next generation for a world shaped by AI, we cannot only hand them tools and call it preparation. We have to help them protect their judgment, their creativity, their confidence, and their capacity to stay human in an increasingly synthetic environment.

And we cannot assume they want more digital immersion just because they were born into it.

Here is what I know after yesterday. They are not waiting for us to figure this out. They are already ahead. Not on the tools. On the things that may actually matter.

So the question is not whether our kids are ready for the AI era. They are navigating it right now, in real time, just like we are. The better question is whether the parents, teachers, and leaders in this valley are even having this conversation. If they are not, they should be. And if they are, what exactly is the plan. Please, not another digital literacy module. Not another assembly. Perhaps something that actually meets these kids where they are — which, as it turns out, is further along than most of us assumed.

Yesterday surprised me. I am hoping it surprises a lot more people too.

Sat Singh hosts SunshineFM daily from Rancho Mirage. He went to talk to local teenagers about AI yesterday. The teenagers won.

Until next time, have a bright and sunshine-y sort of day. — Sat

If this resonates, pass it along to someone in the valley who would benefit. This is a community project — it grows the same way communities do, one conversation at a time.