Question
My daughter, who is in first class, recently brought a small group of her schoolfriends for a sleepover. They laughed and giggled as all nine-year-old girls are wont to do.
In the morning as I was feeding them before they were collected by their parents, one of them took out a smartphone on which the children had accessed Snapchat’s “My AI” earlier. I was horrified that any parent would give a nine-year-old a smartphone. When she arrived, her mum informed me that she had given it to her daughter, so that she could stay in touch with her when she stayed with her dad on some weekends.
How can I protect my child? I don’t want to isolate her from her peer group.
Answer
As Alex Cooney, chief executive of CyberSafeKids, said in her recent article relating to how to protect our children from accessing wholly inappropriate content online, “Ireland is simply not moving fast enough or being sufficiently ambitious. Real change hinges on three pillars: strong regulation and enforcement; embedding critical digital literacy into school curriculums; and equipping parents with the tools to guide their children’s online lives effectively. We may be heading in the right direction, but the pace is far too slow for the realities children face today in an increasingly complex – and sometimes dangerous – digital world.”
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More than a quarter of primary schoolchildren and a third of secondary school students are now using artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots, for homework or to find information, but when Snapchat expanded its AI tool, marketed as a fun and personalised companion, reports highlighted that the bot had, in some cases, offered advice of a sexual nature to children.
As Cooney states so succinctly: “Technology is racing ahead without proper safeguards. It’s truly alarming that billion-dollar companies can roll out AI tools to children with little oversight. A seemingly authoritative chatbot could be a gateway to entirely inappropriate, misleading and frankly, in some cases, dangerous content.”
Thankfully, we are living in a more regulated online safety landscape with the now-enforceable Online Safety Code in Ireland and the Digital Services Act at the European level, with parents and primary school communities focusing on delaying access to smartphones and social media. But, as you discovered on your daughter’s sleepover, there is a significant exposure among children as young as eight to the online world and to all its forms, including chatbots, recommender system-induced “rabbit holes” and wholly inappropriate content.
Unfortunately, we cannot completely protect our children unless we ban the possession of smartphones outright, as some have suggested, for children under 16.
The best we can do is increase our own digital literacy, and that of our children, through the curriculum in schools. Governments at EU and domestic levels must also be prepared to continue to regulate tech, no matter the pressures politically not to do so.
- email: askbrian@irishtimes.com
