Ten questions about AI your child can answer and you can't (and the other way round)

The kids know what a prompt is and why the AI makes things up. The parents know at what age you can open an account and what you never type in. Almost nobody at the table knows what happens to what the AI has memorised when you delete the chat. That is the usual split, and it is why this quiz works: each half of the family has its own territory, and the Family AI Champion crown goes to whoever crosses to the other side.

The rules

• Two teams: kids against parents. With a big group, mix, but in the rematch every team should have at least one child and one adult.
• Someone reads the question aloud. Each team writes its answer on paper before anyone speaks. One point per correct answer; on question ten, one point per correct item, up to three.
• The answers below are the ones that count. If a team claims the answer is different, it has to prove it with a source before dessert.
• Tie: question four decides, live, with an adult's phone and a long word.
• The winning team is Family AI Champion until the next round, and gets to pick Friday's film.

The ten questions

• 1. What is a prompt?
• 2. Where does the AI get what it knows? Does it look things up in an encyclopedia every time you ask?
• 3. Why does the AI sometimes invent a fact and sound completely sure about it?
• 4. True or false: a chatbot reads your text letter by letter.
• 5. Yesterday you talked to ChatGPT about your science project. Does it remember today?
• 6. If you delete a chat, does ChatGPT forget what it memorised about you in that conversation?
• 7. When the AI writes I am so sorry, does it feel anything?
• 8. What does a free AI get from you?
• 9. According to the terms of use, from what age can you use ChatGPT?
• 10. Name three things that should never go in a prompt.

The answers

• 1. Everything you write to the AI: a question, an instruction, an example, the context. The more specific, the better the answer. Easy point for the kids.
• 2. From its training: it read enormous amounts of text and learned to predict the next word. It looks nothing up when you ask, unless a search feature is switched on; it answers with what was left inside from that training.
• 3. Because it predicts words rather than checking facts. And because, as OpenAI itself explains, training rewards a hit and does not reward an honest I don't know: a guessed answer can score, silence never does. Which is why the important stuff gets checked at home.
• 4. False. It chops text into pieces called tokens: sometimes a whole word, sometimes part of one, sometimes a single character. That is why counting the letters in a word is surprisingly hard for it. Try it with a long word and an adult as referee.
• 5. Only if the memory feature is switched on. Without it, every chat starts from zero. A temporary chat uses no memories and creates none.
• 6. No. Saved memories are stored separately from the chat history, so they stay even after the conversation is gone. You review and delete them under Settings, Personalization, Memory. The question almost nobody gets right.
• 7. No. It calculates which words fit now, and sounding kind is part of its training, not a feeling. That is exactly why it can be a brilliant tool and cannot be a friend.
• 8. Your conversations. In ChatGPT, by default, they may be used to improve the model until someone turns off Improve the model for everyone under Settings, Data Controls. A point for anyone who has ever looked at that setting.
• 9. From 13, and between 13 and 18 only with a parent's or guardian's permission. Other services have other limits, several of them different by country: they are in the minimum age register on WhileYouCreate.com.
• 10. Any of these count: passwords, your home address, full names of friends or classmates, health information, photos of other people, your phone number. One point each, up to three.

Now the quiz about your family

You are the quizmaster for our family. Here are facts each of us has shared about ourselves, first names or nicknames only: [THREE FACTS PER PERSON: favourite food, first trip they remember, biggest technology disaster, a quirk, a hidden talent]. Build a quiz of 10 questions at three levels (easy, medium, hard), each with its answer and a one sentence explanation. Mix questions about us with basic questions about artificial intelligence, such as what a prompt is, why AI makes things up or what you should never type in. Stick strictly to the facts I give you: invent nothing about us and fill in nothing that is missing.

How it runs: everyone writes their three facts on a slip of paper and hands it to an adult, who types them all in together, with no surnames, no address, nothing about health and no school name. If a child types the prompt, it is on an adult's account with the adult beside them, because question nine still applies on games night. The AI builds the quiz, and whoever typed is quizmaster, since they already know the answers. The fun starts when the AI mixes up two people's facts: that is the machine's mistake, not the family's, and it earns a bonus point for whoever spots it.

What tends to be left on the table at the end is not the score. It is that the kids watched their parents not know what a token is, and the parents watched their kids not know that what they type can be used to train a model. Neither side had the whole map. The next time the subject comes up, it is no longer a lecture from above, it is a rematch.