What My 8-Year Old Taught Me About Learning, Truth, and AI

My daughter, P, is eight years old. She has a phone not for scrolling, but for shaping reality. With it, she builds songs, stories, and questions. She uses ChatGPT not to cheat, but as a way to explore ideas, challenge what she’s learning, and express what she feels. We have been learning together how to live with AI not as a shortcut, but as a new kind of partner, one that can expand our capacity to imagine, create, and reflect.

At Curiosity Craft, we invite parents to discover new kinds of experiences with their children, like writing songs together using Suno, a generative AI that turns lyrics into music. It's one thing to tell parents that AI can be used creatively. It's another to witness your child test its edges, wrestle with truth, and come back with something astonishing, a song that, by all accounts, should not exist. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s the kind of layered, emotionally intelligent work we don’t expect an eight-year-old or a machine to create. And yet, there it was: a haunting, lyrical reframing of history, born from her care, her curiosity, and her willingness to shape meaning prompt by prompt.

The Song That Should Not Exist

P was preparing herself for a trip to Salem, New York, and had been reading about the infamous witch trials. While exploring the story on her own, she decided to ask ChatGPT to write a short story in the style of The Keepers of the Lost Cities, a fantasy series she loves. But as she read the beginning of that story, a new idea surfaced. She had already been wondering how songs made with AI could be shared on Spotify, just like the ones we were creating with other parents at Curiosity Craft.

That wondering turned into resolution. Instead of finishing the story, she asked ChatGPT to turn it into a song. That’s where the real learning began. The log of her conversation with ChatGPT makes clear that this wasn’t a one-step process. P experimented. Iterated. Shaped.

She began with:

“Make me a historical story of the Salem witch trials but make it in the style of Keeper of the Lost Cities.”
Then she shifted to songwriting:
“Make a song that is not cheesy about the witch 🧙‍♀️ trials.”
Then refined it again:
“Make it for kids to learn what the Salem witch trials was about.”
And when that felt too watered down, she got more specific:
“Make it still have the part that goes ‘Ashes in the name of heaven Smoke in the name of peace🕊️.’”

These were not just instructions. They were evolving expressions of tone, audience, and intent. She was engaging in a form of dialogue. Asking, listening, revising. Not with a human, but with a mirror that speaks back in melody.

What she eventually brought me was astonishing, a song that by all accounts, should not exist. Not because it was inaccurate or wrong, but because it was the kind of layered, emotionally intelligent work we don’t expect from an eight-year-old or a machine. And yet, there it was: a haunting, lyrical reframing of history, born from her care, her curiosity, and her willingness to shape meaning prompt by prompt.

When she finally brought me the lyrics, they took my breath away:

They lived in quiet, snowy towns
Where stories traveled faster down
The lane than truth could catch its breath
And questions sometimes led to death

A girl who danced beneath the moon
A boy who hummed a quiet tune
Were seen as strange, and that was all
But strange was all it took to fall

Ashes in the name of heaven
Smoke in the name of peace
Fear became the loudest lesson
Kindness lost its lease

The lyrics were poetic, vivid, and eerily mature, haunting in the way only something created by someone still learning the world could be. We read the lyrics together, line by line. Some verses did not quite make sense. I asked, "Do you understand this phrase?" She replied, "No." We struggled together to shape a song from those words in the same way an experienced artist wrestles with expression, searching for what will truly move others.

Learning to Shape the World and Check Its Facts

We then together opened Suno, played with styles and created a song we liked. Not too sad, not too dark, something we felt was a decent interpretation of the lyrics and the emotions we wanted to convey to share it with kids. I then offered her to explore if we could make a video with it and asked ChatGPT to create images in different styles to make a video clip for the song.

It was at that moment, when the images started to come out, that something unexpected happened. One of the AI generated images showed a red haired girl bound to a stake, flames rising beneath her. The sky glowed with smoke and fire. Puritan villagers looked on with grim faces. 

For a moment, she just stared. Then came the sentence I didn’t expect:

"But that did not happen," she said.

I asked, "What did not happen?"

She replied, "No one was burned during the Salem witch trials. That is not in any of the books I am reading. What really happened is that most were hanged, and others died in prison."

I grew up outside the United States. I did not know. But she did. Because she had read real books.

Learning to Be Creative Aware That AI Does Not Tell the Truth

This experience changed how I think about education, storytelling, parenting, and AI’s role in all three.

My first impulse had been to declare: children should stop reading and start creating. But that's not right. Reading gave P the knowledge to recognize the historical error. Books gave her the factual foundation that made her creative work more honest, not less.

AI didn’t replace her reading, it created new possibilities for exploring and expressing what she had learned. The tools amplified her curiosity and creativity, but her critical thinking came from somewhere else entirely.

We’re not choosing between old ways of learning and new ones. We’re learning to combine them thoughtfully. The future isn’t about replacing books with ChatGPT, or traditional research with AI generation. It’s about raising children who can move fluidly between different ways of knowing, creating, and verifying.

P showed me what that looks like: someone who can prompt AI with sophistication, iterate on creative ideas, collaborate with artificial intelligence as a thinking partner, and still catch it when it gets the facts wrong. Someone who can make art while staying tethered to truth.

The Dilemma: Artistic Freedom vs. Factual Integrity

This moment opened a door. We had created something beautiful, but it was not entirely true. What do you do with that?

First, I had the talk that every parent should have with a child. These tools are amazing, but what they offer are not truths and we always need to be aware of that. This is not just a fact that children should memorize, it is a skill they need to develop.

Second, to be responsible for what we were doing, we had two options: keep the lyrics, claiming artistic license, or change the song knowing that Suno generates music anew each time. It was a pity, because we really liked the song we already had.

I asked P what she thought. Her answer surprised me. "Let us ask ChatGPT what it would do."

She sees ChatGPT not just as a tool, but as a partner in the conversation. So we asked. It gave us three options. The one we chose was a hybrid: keep the poetic line that rhymed ("Fire in the name of heaven"), but remove the direct reference to burning and add a new verse clarifying the historical truth.

We chose the hybrid path. We kept the powerful refrain, "Ashes in the name of heaven, Smoke in the name of peace," because it worked as metaphor. But we added a new verse that acknowledged the historical reality:

No pyres burned in Salem town,
The ropes, not fire, pulled good souls down;
Yet fear can blaze without a flame,
And silence fans it just the same.

This was no longer just a song. It was an ethical decision. A creative one. A learning moment that spanned history, storytelling, poetic structure, authorship, memory, and integrity.

What We Actually Made

Using Runway AI, we animated the corrected images into short video clips, then stitched them together with our music. The process took about four hours of working together, time that felt less like digital screen time and more like the kind of deep, collaborative making that happens when a parent and child build something with their hands.

The result? P now has a song on Spotify. A real song, with her voice woven through the creative process, addressing a complex historical topic with nuance and care. When she shares it with friends, she’s not just sharing entertainment, she’s sharing something she learned, questioned, and thoughtfully revised.

"What’s scarier," I asked her, "this song or Harry Potter?"

"Harry Potter" she replied without hesitation.

To her, exploring a cruel aspect of life was not frightening. She’s getting ready to visit a place with real history, and the song was part of how she was making sense of what people once did to each other, and why.

What This Means for All of Us

We may not be far from the day an eight-year-old wins an Oscar for a short film made with AI. But more importantly, we may be raising a generation that can create in ways we cannot even imagine yet, while maintaining the critical thinking skills to know when something is beautiful but not true.

The tools are here. The possibilities are real. An eight-year-old, with the right guidance and foundation, can create something that rivals professional work, something emotionally resonant, technically impressive, and personally meaningful.

But she can only do it well if she also knows how to learn from books, think critically about sources, and choose accuracy over convenience when it matters.

The fears about AI in education aren't wrong, they point to what matters most. We can't wait for schools, governments, or corporations to figure this out. We need to be participants in the conversations that will define the world we leave for our children. We need to be in conversation with them as they navigate these new possibilities.

We need to help them write the real song, the one that harmonizes human knowledge with artificial intelligence, creativity with accuracy, innovation with wisdom.

And now, in the space between melody and memory, between invention and integrity, she’s learning how to sing.

The video shared in this post is the result of a collaboration between an 8 year old, ChatGPT, Runway, Suno and a father.  
Lyrics: 8 year old and ChatGPT 
Song: 8 year old, Suno and dad. 
Images: 8 year old, ChatGPT and dad. 
Short Videos: 8 year old and Runway.   
Video Editing: Dad.