This Safer Internet Day, WebWise are inviting parents, educators, schools, and young people to consider how AI shapes online experiences.
Through a series of workshops and guidelines, the annual day hopes to empower children to thrive online, equipped with skills to navigate both the opportunities and challenges of all that comes with being on the internet.
This year's theme is AI Aware: Safe, Smart, and in Control. It is a reminder to parents and children alike that, while these technologies have benefits, they also raise risks and concerns.
A Parents' Guide to Generative AI
Developed in collaboration with the ADAPT Centre and the National Parents Council, a helpful guide has been created for parents, providing practical advice and guidance on safely and responsibly navigating Generative AI.
You can see a snippet from the guide, listing the risks and benefits of AI below, and you can find the full guide at webwise.ie/aiaware.
GenAI – The Benefits
Generative AI, whether standalone tools like ChatGPT or integrated into another platform, can be used to improve accessibility by making content more tailored and easier to understand.
Features like speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, and image descriptions make content and tools
more accessible for people with different learning preferences, languages, or abilities to engage with.
Generative AI tools can make accessing information, advice, and assistance faster and more personalised than traditional searches or resources. Instead of sifting through multiple websites or books, users can get
explanations, summaries, or step-by-step guidance in one place, tailored to their specific query.
This can save time by making the finding of information more efficient, providing immediate answers and feedback. However, users should always be aware that Generative AI tools can give inaccurate and/or misleading information.
Saving time and productivity
While there are concerns, including accuracy, overreliance, and the risk of plagiarism, generative AI can be a useful tool for homework and study. It can help explain difficult concepts, summarise information from multiple sources, provide examples, help brainstorm ideas or offer step-by-step guidance, supporting young people to deepen their understanding.
Homework and study
Generative AI can provide tools to allow young people to explore their creativity. It lets young people try out new ideas, like writing stories, composing music, creating digital art, or making videos, without needing advanced technical skills.
Creativity
It is essential to be aware of the minimum age requirements of any Generative AI tools your child is using, the parental controls available, and be aware of school policy around the use of AI Tools.
However, age restrictions can sometimes be unclear or easy to bypass, so they should not be relied on as a complete safeguard. While these measures can help to minimise the risk of your child encountering inappropriate or inaccurate content, it is important to have open conversations with your child and remind them to come to you if they encounter something online that bothers or upsets them.
GenAI – The Risks:
Bias
Generative AI tools can reflect biases present in the data they were trained on. This means the content they produce may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes, favour certain viewpoints, or exclude others. For example, an AI trained mostly on images of certain types of people might struggle to represent others accurately, or a language model might give answers that reflect cultural or social biases.
Overreliance
It's important to be aware of the potential for young people to become over-reliant on Generative AI tools. While they can be helpful for homework, creative projects, or idea generation, relying on it too much
can limit critical thinking, problem solving, and independent learning.
This could lead to academic dependency or plagiarism if there is a reliance on AI tools to complete homework, or if content produced from Generative AI tools (commonly termed AI-generated content)
is submitted as original work.
Encouraging your child to use AI as a support tool rather than a replacement for their own thinking helps them develop skills while still benefiting from the technology. In fact, because of Generative AI’s potential for producing inaccurate or misleading information, ensuring young people have the skills and the level of subject knowledge to be able to critically assess Generative AI information is essential.
Privacy
Privacy is an important consideration when using generative AI tools. Many AI platforms collect and store the prompts and data users provide, which could include personal information. Even if the AI doesn’t "remember" individual sessions, the information shared with it may be used to train the AI or shared
with a third party.
Encourage your child to avoid sharing sensitive personal information and to be mindful of what they input in their prompt or upload when interacting with GenAI tools.
Environmental Impact
As the use of Generative AI in apps and tools grows, so does its energy demand. The resources needed to train and maintain Generative AI systems and data centres involve high energy and water use, highlighting the risks of significant resource consumption and carbon emissions.
Estimates suggest that "a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search," and that "large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations" (Crawford, 2024).
Design features (Persuasive design)
Tools are often designed to be engaging, helpful and tend to 'people please’. This means they may give answers that sound confident, agreeable, or entertaining, even when the information isn’t fully accurate. Some tools encourage ongoing interaction by prompting users to ask more questions, often tailoring responses to align with the user’s views or expectations.
AI companions, which are often designed for deeper interactions, don’t just wait for user prompts; they can initiate interactions. These companions are designed to feel friendly, supportive, and responsive, and children could be susceptible to forming attachments or placing trust in them.
In this instance, it is important to remember that these companions are artificial in nature, designed to simulate these qualities.
Misinformation and Inaccurate Content
GenAI can produce content that appears convincing but is inaccurate, misleading or biased. This happens because AI creates its answers based on patterns it learns from lots of sources, like websites, books, articles, text or images, some of which may have mistakes, bias, or outdated information.
The AI’s main goal is to produce content that is fluent and plausible, not what is guaranteed to be true. Sometimes it can even make up an answer that sounds real but is not, which is called a "hallucination".
Hallucinations happen because the goal of the AI is to predict a plausible response, even if it doesn’t know the answer. It may not know the answer because the training data did not contain the information, the information is too new, or the question requires real thinking or logic.
Harassment and Harmful Content
Remind young people that AI-generated content isn’t always accurate, encourage them to think critically, and verify information with a trusted source.
Generative AI tools have the potential to be used to create content that targets or harms others. For example, Generative AI tools could be used to generate messages, images, or videos intended to mock, humiliate, or spread false information about someone.
Deepfakes or other types of manipulated media can make this content even more convincing. It is crucial for young people to recognise that using Generative AI content for these purposes is harmful and carries serious risks, such as potential legal consequences. It is important to encourage safe and respectful use of
these technologies.
