I’ve spent my whole career in technology. I saw my first computer in 1996, started working in IT in 2001, and these days I work with AI — and I try hard to stay up to date with how fast it’s moving. If you work in this field, you know that “keeping up” is practically a full-time job on its own.
So I’m not someone who’s afraid of new technology. I love it. But I’ll be honest with you: when it comes to AI, I’m a skeptic.
Excited and skeptical at the same time
What AI can do today is genuinely amazing. But the longer I work with it, the more clearly I also see its limits — and its dangers. It gets things confidently wrong. It can be used to manipulate. And it keeps getting better at imitating real people, real voices, and real photos.
The part that worries me most isn’t some far-off science-fiction scenario. It’s what’s happening right now, quietly, every single day: there is more and more AI-generated content online. It’s reached the point where it genuinely bugs me. Scrolling through a feed and not being sure what’s real anymore isn’t just annoying — it’s not a nice way to experience the internet. And I kept thinking: if it’s hard for me, after more than two decades in tech, what is it like for a child?
Then it got personal
I have a daughter. Her name is Charlie, and she’s nine.
She’s a lovely, curious girl who does well in school. She loves crafting and fun activities, and she’s at her happiest playing with other kids or splashing around a swimming pool on holiday. A completely normal, wonderful nine-year-old. And like a lot of modern kids, she also loves her gadgets — she has a phone and a tablet, and she wants to be a YouTuber. In fact, she’s already started: she has her own little YouTube channel, and I help her with it.
That part really stayed with me. Charlie doesn’t just watch the online world — she’s already in it, creating and publishing, with me right beside her.
I’ve been careful: she doesn’t have access to ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot. But here’s the uncomfortable truth I had to face: she’s already exposed. Not through some obvious “AI app,” but through the ordinary, seemingly safe places — YouTube, the games she plays, the platforms that feel harmless. AI-generated and AI-curated content is already part of her daily world, whether I like it or not.
And I realized I had a choice to make.
I don’t want to lock her out — I want to prepare her
I could try to keep my daughter away from all of it. But that isn’t realistic, and honestly, I don’t even want to. I want her to grow up using the latest technology, the newest tools and gadgets. That’s the world she’ll live and work in. Shielding her from it doesn’t protect her — it just leaves her unprepared.
What I want is simpler to say and harder to do: I want her to use all of it, and be safe doing it.
Safe meaning she can tell when something online is fake. Safe meaning she understands what AI actually is — a clever tool that guesses from patterns, not a magic oracle that’s always right. Safe meaning she knows how to protect her information, and her own thinking.
So I built the thing I wished existed
That’s where ThinkaBit came from. Not a boardroom or a market study — just a dad wanting to give his kid the one thing I couldn’t buy anywhere: the skills to navigate AI wisely.
I built it the way I’d build it for my own daughter, because that’s exactly what I was doing. A playful app for kids 7–12 that teaches what AI really is, how to spot deepfakes and fakes, and how to stay safe online — through quick games, not lectures. Something that turns “be careful out there” from a worried parent’s catchphrase into a real, practiced skill.
Charlie is already on her way to becoming a YouTuber, and I help her every step. But I want her to be the kind of creator who understands exactly how the machine works — not the kind who gets fooled by it.
Charlie is the reason ThinkaBit exists. My hope is that it helps your kids too — to be a little safer on their devices today, and a lot more prepared for the AI-shaped world they’re growing up into.
— Ioan, founder of ThinkaBit
If you’d like your child to be the boss of AI instead of fooled by it, join the waitlist — I’d love to have you along for the journey.