I did what millions now do. I generated a few images using Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude. Clean lines. Good lighting. Slightly stylised. To me, they looked fine. For validation, I dropped them into our four-member family WhatsApp group — the informal civic square of the Indian household, where news, politics, jokes and judgments circulate with equal velocity.
My 13-year-old daughter responded instantly: “It looks ugly.”
It wasn’t the aesthetic she objected to. It was the method. The images had been created by artificial intelligence (AI). She had read, she said, about the water consumption of data centres and the energy demands of training large models. Ironically, I had argued here last week that Big Tech must not be allowed to move its data centres to India. That was a public policy argument. My kid was thinking about our personal lives. Using AI casually, she concluded, was “irresponsible bruh.”
It turns out many of her friends voice similar concerns. On asking around in different parts of the city, the refrain was familiar: AI is environmentally damaging. AI is ethically fraught. This sentiment is not uniquely Indian. An international survey published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that 59% of young people aged 16 to 25 described themselves as very or extremely worried about climate change. Separately, a 2025 global study by the University of Melbourne and KPMG, surveying respondents across 47 countries, found that while AI adoption is widespread, fewer than half of respondents said they were willing to trust AI systems fully.
This is where a deep contradiction emerges.
Priya Srinivasan, founder of Pomegranate Workshop, has spent nearly two decades working with children across grades. She has observed how young minds evolve alongside technology. She is not an alarmist. “There are no right or wrong answers here,” she said. “We can only observe with them because we don’t know either where the answers lie.”
Technology has always unsettled before it settled. Neither children nor adults can fully predict its trajectory. But she added something that stayed with me: “There is some dejection I feel with the younger ones.” Today’s children are extraordinarily well-informed. Technology is not a tool they must learn; it is a language they speak. They can articulate concerns about carbon intensity, data privacy and algorithmic bias with fluency. The issue, Srinivasan says, is not awareness. It is their agency.
We have given them the vocabulary to study systems — climate change, extraction, inequality, AI ethics. They can diagnose what is broken. But have we built pathways that allow them to intervene?
If a 13-year-old believes artificial intelligence harms the planet, what is the next step available to her? Opt out? Lobby for regulation as she grows up? Study computer science to build alternatives? The routes from critique to construction are not obvious.
Information today is abundant. Answers are instantaneous. The challenge is no longer access but application — not watching a video about sustainable agriculture, but growing food; not just knowing that data centres consume water, but designing systems that reduce that consumption.
Next week, in Delhi, some of the world’s most powerful technologists, policymakers and investors will gather at the India AI Impact Summit. They will debate compute capacity, regulation, safety, sustainability and India’s opportunity in what is often described as the AI century. They will talk about how infrastructure can be financed, how compute capabilities can be expanded, and how chips can be manufactured.
India is uniquely positioned: a young population, climate vulnerability, digital ambition and a desire to lead in advanced technologies. But leadership must also be measured by whether young citizens feel they are participants in the systems being built — not passive consumers of them. Because if a generation is already skeptical, not of technology itself, but of its moral cost, then scaling AI is only half the task. The other half is earning trust.
That trust will not emerge automatically from innovation. It will require transparency about trade-offs, inclusion in decision-making, and education that connects ethical critique with practical experimentation. This means giving them the tools to shape the systems that will soon govern their lives.
My daughter’s objection to my display picture may not have been about aesthetics at all. It may be an early signal. In a country where public debates increasingly begin in family WhatsApp groups before reaching Parliament, such signals matter. A generation raised on infinite information is not short of questions. What it is waiting for are levers.
We gave our kids a vocabulary to critique. It is time to equip them with the tools to solve problems.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com)
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