You’re reading Open Questions , Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human.

Over the past few months, I’ve introduced artificial intelligence into the hobby life of my seven-year-old son, Peter. On Saturdays, he takes a coding class, in which he recently made a version of rock-paper-scissors, and he really wants to make more sophisticated games at home. I gave ChatGPT and Claude a sense of his skill level, and they instantaneously suggested next steps. Claude proposed trying to recreate Pong in Scratch, a coding environment for kids. We downloaded it, and I sat in an armchair, with ChatGPT on my iPad, while Peter gave the project a shot on the computer. Whenever he got stuck, I answered his questions, drawing either on my own programming knowledge or on A.I. He f

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