September 5, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 4 min read · Tech & AI
Teaching my own mum to use AI tools confidently turned out to require a genuinely different approach than teaching a client, partly because the relationship lets me be more bluntly honest, and partly because the actual risks I most wanted to protect her against weren't really about the legitimate tools at all — they were about the scams that increasingly piggyback on the same general hype and confusion.
Where I Actually Started
Not with the tools themselves, but with a fairly blunt, direct conversation about how AI hype is currently being actively exploited by scammers — fake "AI investment" schemes, fraudulent tools impersonating well-known legitimate ones, voice-cloning scams that specifically rely on people not yet having a clear, intuitive sense of what's currently technically possible and what still isn't. Before showing her anything genuinely useful, I wanted her to have a healthy, working scepticism already in place.
The Specific Rule I Gave Her
Anything that promises guaranteed money through AI, anything urgently demanding personal information citing AI-related reasons, and anything asking her to download software from outside a legitimate app store to "access" some new AI feature — all of it gets an automatic, immediate "no," full stop, no further consideration needed before involving me first. That's a simple enough rule to actually stick under real pressure, which matters more than a longer, more nuanced rule she'd be less likely to remember in the actual moment.
What I Actually Showed Her That's Genuinely Useful
A couple of mainstream, legitimate, well-known tools for things she already wanted help with — drafting a tricky email, summarising a long document a community group had sent her. I deliberately kept the actual list short rather than overwhelming her with every interesting feature or tool that exists, because confidence with a couple of tools, genuinely understood, beats vague, shallow familiarity with many tools she'd never actually use unprompted.
The Moment It Actually Clicked for Her
She used a tool to draft a genuinely difficult, emotionally awkward letter she'd been avoiding writing for weeks, and the relief and confidence on her face afterwards taught me more about why this mattered than any abstract explanation of the underlying technology ever could have. The actual value, for her, was never about the technology being impressive in the abstract — it was about one specific, real task suddenly feeling much less daunting and avoidable.
Why This Approach Differs From Teaching a Business Client
A client typically wants efficiency and proper integration into an existing, established workflow. My mum mostly wanted confidence and protection from being taken advantage of by people exploiting her unfamiliarity with something genuinely new. Same broad underlying technology. Completely different, genuinely appropriate teaching priorities depending on who's actually in front of me and what they actually need from it.
What I'd Tell Anyone Teaching an Older Relative
Lead with the scam awareness, clearly and directly, before the actual features, because the scam landscape genuinely moves faster than most people's general familiarity with what's currently real versus fake, and that specific gap is exactly what scammers are actively, deliberately exploiting right now. Then keep the genuinely useful list short, real, and tied to something they already, concretely wanted help with, rather than a broad, impressive-sounding tour of everything currently possible.
The Bigger Pattern This Reflects
Technology adoption across generations has always had this same basic shape — genuine opportunity sitting right alongside genuine, real risk, with the gap between them often coming down to confidence, context, and a bit of patient guidance from someone willing to actually sit down properly and explain it clearly. AI isn't fundamentally different in this respect. It's just the current specific chapter of a much older, ongoing story.