Parents Must Fight AI Influence on Kids or Risk Losing Them to Lies

A recent CBN segment explored a simple but urgent point: Generation Alpha is the first generation being raised side-by-side with artificial intelligence, and they will need clear tools to tell what’s real and what’s fake. The piece featured former intelligence officer Adam Hardage, who has written a book called The Alpha Blueprint that lays out how parents and communities can prepare kids for an AI-drenched future.

Hardage’s background in operations and national security gives his warnings weight; his interviews and appearances present him as a father and a former clandestine operator who sees AI not as an abstract concern but as an active threat to cultural and intellectual formation. He’s been touring conservative and faith-based media to push the message that families must take responsibility before algorithms do the parenting.

The core of Hardage’s argument is straightforward and moral: AI can be used to enhance God-given creativity, or it can be leaned on until children become “an unoriginal copy of a copy of a copy.” That visceral phrasing should wake up every parent who remembers what it was like to learn, struggle, and create without an app doing the thinking for you.

Conservatives ought to applaud and amplify this message instead of leaving shaping the next generation to liberal institutions and Big Tech. For years the left has ceded cultural authority to classrooms and corporations; now those same forces are selling convenience wrapped in algorithms that quietly erode individual responsibility and faith. We must insist that technology serve families, not replace them.

Hardage even warns that AI will democratize high-level expertise cheaply, meaning our children can rent someone else’s thinking rather than build habits of judgment and virtue. That’s not a neutral technological change — it’s a cultural shift that rewards conformity, dependency, and intellectual laziness if we permit it.

Practically speaking, his advice is rooted in common-sense practices conservatives already value: teach children to be bored, to think for themselves, to sharpen discernment, and to ground their identity in family and faith rather than feeds and likes. These are not trendy educational theories; they are the sturdier, older disciplines that produce responsible adults and citizens.

On policy and on the ground, conservatives should push curricula that prioritize media literacy, critical thinking, parental control, and transparent rules about deepfakes and AI in classrooms. Don’t trust Big Tech or distant bureaucrats to self-regulate; demand parental opt-outs, local oversight, and accountability for platforms that weaponize deception. Our communities and our laws should protect childhood from becoming a testing ground for corporate experiments.

This is a call to action for every hardworking American parent: own the culture in your home, teach your children to know truth from illusion, and refuse the easy surrender of mind and spirit to machines. If we do nothing, the next generation will be shaped more by algorithms than by the values that made this country great. Stand up for your children, for family, and for the God-given creativity that no machine can legitimately replace.