There's a particular kind of tired that comes from nodding along when your kid mentions "prompting" something or "using AI" for a project, and you genuinely have no picture in your head of what they mean. You're not alone in that, and it's a fixable gap, not a permanent one.
Here's the fast way to close it. The next time your kid uses a term you don't recognize, just ask an AI tool directly: "My son just said he 'prompted an AI' for his essay — what does that actually mean, in plain English?" You'll get a real, jargon-free answer, and often a short example alongside it.
You can do this with basically any term that comes up — "AI model," "chatbot," "generative AI," whatever gets dropped into conversation. Instead of pretending to know or feeling embarrassed asking your teenager to explain it for the third time, you get a patient, repeatable explanation exactly when you need it.
Once you're comfortable with the vocabulary, understanding what your kids are actually doing with these tools gets a lot less mysterious — and a lot of it turns out to be far less complicated than it sounded secondhand.
On Ramp AI includes a plain-English glossary approach exactly for this reason — so you're never stuck nodding along again. Here's where to start.