Female clones of male mice and young people’s uneven appetite for AI are the two headline items in MIT Technology Review’s August 13 edition of The Download. They belong in the same newsletter, not the same evidence bucket: one is a brief report of a laboratory result, the other a qualitative account from editors who spoke with people aged 10 to 18.
Jen Swetzoff and Keeley McNamara, founding editors of the independent tween and teen magazine Anyway, said their conversations produced more complicated responses than the standard AI script of cheating, deepfakes and job fears. Some of the young people they spoke with did not want AI in their lives, or declined to discuss it. Others raised concerns about cheating, environmental effects, creativity and critical thinking.
The editors also said AI did not appear to command the kind of demand they see for iPhones or Snapchat. That is an observation from their interviews, not a survey result for children as a whole.
What did young people say about AI?
The short version is that the group described by Anyway’s editors was neither uniformly enthusiastic nor uniformly panicked. Their concerns centered on what AI could do to schoolwork, creative work and thinking, alongside its environmental cost.
A separate University of Washington study underscores why the details of AI use deserve scrutiny, though it did not survey young people. Researchers prompted six language models to continue English-language stories about talking animals, then examined 23,800 outputs. They found that 57% of characters were ungendered or gender-neutral, 41% were male and 2% were female. The models generate text token by token from learned patterns, a process outlined in how LLMs work when they answer a prompt, rather than retrieving a finished story from a library.
The Washington study concerned model outputs, not kids’ opinions. Mixing those findings together would turn two distinct questions into one mushy claim, which is how AI coverage ends up eating its own homework.
How were female clones of male mice reportedly created?
MIT Technology Review reported that a Japan-based team deliberately converted male mouse embryos into females for the first time. The report says the researchers used a CRISPR-based method to remove the Y chromosome from male cells, producing female clones of male mice. Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi who co-led the work, said it could challenge the assumption that mammalian reproduction requires both female and male contributors. He said he hopes the technique could eventually help conservation efforts when few animals remain.
The available report does not establish the new experiment’s success rate, outcomes, fertility or full method. It also should not be confused with earlier work on mice with two male genetic parents.
In a 2025 experiment described by Chemical & Engineering News, a Chinese Academy of Sciences team led by Wei Li edited 20 genes in male haploid embryonic stem cells, largely by removing imprinting control regions. Researchers combined a modified cell and sperm in an egg whose nucleus had been removed, then transferred embryos to a surrogate. A small number of resulting two-male-parent mice reached adulthood, but they were sterile and had growth defects.
That earlier work confronted genomic imprinting, in which the activity of some gene copies depends on whether they came from a mother or father. Proper imprinting is needed for development, and the 2025 researchers called it a central barrier to unisexual reproduction in mammals. It provides context for the new report, not confirmation that the two experiments used the same technique or achieved the same result.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.
