ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ON CHILDREN'S WELL-BEING
Mumenya Patrick
Children
are growing with AI and there is a growing need to assess how AI attends to
children’s needs as well the risks it poses to children’s wellbeing. In the
recent past, there has been an increase in adopting AI to help children in
education, health, and safety, however, this has come with the risks of
violations of children's rights and privacy issues. This article summary is
aimed at assessing how to bridge the gap between the benefits and the risks AI
poses to children.
In recent years, AI has gradually
been integrated into our daily lives. This is evident in various AI
applications and software adopting AI plug-ins to help them become efficient
(Sakulkueakulsuk et al., 2018). Thus, there is a need to train children on how
to use these apps and software while observing caution. The training should
major in areas like basic approaches to AI, descriptions of AI, and special
formats in AI (Burgsteiner et al. 2016). For example, a recent study by
(Williams et al. 2019) focused on developing a hands-on toolkit and curriculum
that is aimed at helping young children of four to seven years learn about AI
by designing a social robot called PopBot. The goal of training children and
young people to use and utilize AI should be to build capacity in them to
understand and create with AI technology.
However, while
children and young people are being trained on how to use AI there is a great
need to mind their wellbeing and confidentiality. For example, in research
conducted by Druga and colleagues (Druga et al.,2018) they found that children
are more likely to trust smart to the extent of sharing personal information
that is considered confidential.
The objectives of
this essay are the following:
1. To
assess the impact of AI on children’s well-being.
2. To
show that AI and children’s wellbeing is an area of concern for children’s
workers, parents, and educators.
3. To
examine how AI can be used to help children as they grow and develop.
4. To
understand the need for regulations in implementing AI in schools.
According
to Wahl et al (2018), AI holds countless possibilities for revolutionizing how
children in poor communities access healthcare services. This is possible
because AI solves many hurdles experienced with health management systems. With
the integration of AI in social media applications, there are numerous
opportunities for digital creation and innovation. However, while these
opportunities are plenty children are at a greater risk of accessing AI-
manipulated data which makes them potential prey to hackers and other online
manipulators (Ali et al., 2021). To counter this, government institutions and
stakeholders should consider coming up with policies that protect children from
deep fakes, manipulators, and online scammers (Ali et al., 2021).
Comments
I must note that the Choice of objectives was also sound though the angle was a bit broad because the topic structure was also broad in nature.
A narrowed-down topic would help us dig more into the phenomenon and understand more about this field.
The responses to the objective, “To examine how AI can be used to help children as they grow and develop.” Didn’t come out strong enough to show how AI can be used to help children as they grow and develop. Moreover, strong evidence as to why regulation is needed in implementing AI in Schools wasn’t adequately shared providing room for more literature review or research.
Else, there is room to work on this as a paper that can help the Stakeholders in policy Formulation.
It would however benefit from a more narrowed to a facet of the same and more contextualisation for better understanding on the issue of the same in the Kenyan context; more examples, local studies etc