Actor and Christian podcast host Kirk Cameron is urging parents to teach children how to think before artificial intelligence teaches them what to believe.
“Critical thinking will be a survival skill,” Cameron said in a Sept. 11 episode of his podcast. The warning came after he described a test involving two leading AI platforms, a calendar and a year so far in the future that the answer should have been easy to check.
Cameron said a cardiologist friend entered the year 8192 into Google Gemini and asked three straightforward calendar questions: the weekday of Jan. 1, the months containing a Friday the 13th and the date of Thanksgiving, assuming it remained the fourth Thursday in November.
According to Cameron, Gemini confidently returned answers that could not all describe the same calendar. His friend then gave the actual calendar to ChatGPT, which Cameron said correctly explained Gemini’s mistake before producing incorrect answers of its own. When ChatGPT was asked to create a graphic showing the failure, Cameron said it generated a February with 33 nonconsecutive days.
“The danger is not simply that AI can be wrong. The danger is that it can be spectacularly false while sounding spectacularly certain,” Cameron said in the episode’s opening discussion. The National Institute of Standards and Technology described a related risk as “confabulation,” when generative AI produces confidently stated but erroneous or false content.
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Cameron said polished answers can make false information look like knowledge, especially when the person receiving the answer does not understand the underlying subject. That concern becomes more urgent for children, he said, because AI can now complete assignments and solve problems that once required students to wrestle with the material themselves.
“What if we’re outsourcing the mental struggle that God intended to produce wisdom in them?” Cameron asked. He argued that children need more than the ability to ask an AI tool a question; they need enough knowledge of math, grammar, history, science, logic, rhetoric and Scripture to recognize when an answer does not make sense.
That advice lines up with guidance from the American Psychological Association, which tells parents to encourage teenagers to question AI-generated content and use AI to supplement, rather than replace, their own problem-solving skills. The APA also recommends that families talk with teens about who is behind an answer, whether the information applies to them and what limitations the tool may have.
Cameron pointed viewers to Proverbs 14:15, which says the simple believe everything while the prudent consider their steps. He also cited 1 Thessalonians 5:21: “Test everything; hold fast to what is good.”
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization made a similar point in a Sept. 8 ministerial statement, calling for AI that prompts learners to reason and perform cognitive work while protecting age-appropriate education. Cameron’s conclusion was less about abandoning technology than putting it in its proper place.
“Tools have to remain tools,” Cameron said. For parents, that can mean giving children problems to solve without technology, asking what source supports an AI answer and requiring them to look for contradictions before accepting polished output as truth.
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