AI is going to eat my future. So I'm learning to build it instead.

There is a small industry now of adults writing thoughtful pieces about how we — teenage girls — will suffer the most from AI. We will not get jobs. We will be replaced. Our art will be stolen. Our essays will be flagged. Our voices will be cloned. Our futures, they explain, gently, are cooked.

I have read many of these pieces. I have found them, on the whole, correct and also completely useless.

Here is what I am doing instead. I am learning Python. Not because I love Python. I do not love Python. I am learning it because the boys in my class who are in the AI club spend their time laughing at girls who do not know Python, and I do not intend to be laughed at for very much longer.

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I am not scared of the machine. I am scared of the boys who own the machine.

— Lena Kowalski

I am not scared of the machine. I am scared of the boys who own the machine.

Every girl I know in my grade is either learning to code, learning to model, or learning to write in a way that a large language model cannot fake. We have made a pact. It is not a formal pact. It is more of a look we give each other in the hallway. It says: they will not take this from us. We are going to be too fluent, too fast, too specific to replace.

We will see if it works. But at least we will have built the thing, instead of writing an op-ed about it.