US First Lady Melania Trump said artificial intelligence is set to shape the future but urged the public to remain cautious in how they use it, sharing the advice and personal anecdotes during a wide-ranging interview on "The Big Money Show."

Speaking with the show's hosts, she described AI as a major talking point and said the nation needed to use the technology intelligently. Users, she emphasized, should not blindly trust everything they see and should better educate themselves about these tools so they can accurately judge what is authentic.

Her remarks come at a time when technology pioneers are increasingly sounding the alarm about AI and demanding tighter controls. President Donald Trump, for his part, has dismissed those AI safety warnings, calling them a "hoax."

Melania encourages students to learn to use AI

The First Lady also backed incorporating artificial intelligence into education, saying the technology can play an important role in schools and deliver educational benefits for children.

She pointed to a recent visit to North Carolina, where Nvidia and other organizations provided AI learning resources to students. The White House said earlier this month that the initiative gave 1,500 students in Ashe County AI literacy training licenses and 100 robotics learning kits powered by Nvidia's Jetson Nano technology.

During an earlier visit to Mountain View Elementary School in rural Jefferson, a school focused on AI, robotics, and engineering, the First Lady said students must be taught how to use AI if America is to stay at the forefront of the AI race.

"I think they need to learn that we need to lead. Of course, they need to be vigilant as well. But this is our future. And we need to guide them and teach them what is available. If not, they will stay behind. And we need to be the first, in the United States, to lead," she said.

On "The Big Money Show," she also argued that AI could be highly educational for students, though she called for careful use of the technology.

Asked how she uses the technology herself, the First Lady explained that she primarily relies on AI for research. The technology allows her to quickly find information when she wants to understand a subject, she said, but she checks answers elsewhere whenever she is uncertain whether an AI-generated response is accurate.

Her approach highlights one of the central challenges of rapid generative AI adoption: users can access information almost instantly, but the responses still need to be verified. The emphasis on verification reflects growing concern about the reliability of AI-generated information. Generative AI systems can produce good answers while still making factual errors, so it is important for users to treat AI as a tool for research rather than a source of truth. For students in particular, digital literacy could become an important part of AI education as schools introduce the technology into classrooms.

Melania pushes digital skills initiative

Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, the First Lady championed her "Fostering the Future Together" initiative, which unites the public sector and technology corporations to equip young people with crucial digital skills and schooling.

"We are living in an extraordinary moment in human history. We stand together at the threshold of a technological revolution," she asserted.

She reiterated that providing children with technological tools is only the first step, noting that they also need guidance on how to use them properly.

Some scholars remain opposed to children becoming acquainted with AI. MIT professor Eric Klopfer has even warned that the technology creates an "illusion of learning." An MIT committee investigating AI's role in education likewise found preliminary signs that leaning too heavily on chatbots can blunt critical thinking, fade memory, shake student confidence, and hurt overall subject mastery.

Trump rebrands AI as 'super intelligence'

President Donald Trump separately called for the United States to dominate the AI space in his United Nations General Assembly speech on Tuesday, using the address to rebrand artificial intelligence with a new term: "super intelligence."

"Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this, and now I say whoever wins, whoever wins 'superintelligence,' wins. That's the group that wins," Trump said.

"We're leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. We're going to keep it that way. We're going to keep it very straight and very strong," he added.

The US President also maintained his opposition to implementing regulatory frameworks or new guardrails, a position that conflicts with the views of numerous UN delegates. Nonetheless, proponents of stronger AI regulation have much ahead of them: they still need to ensure that international diplomacy can evolve quickly enough to keep pace with rapidly accelerating technology.