Teaching children about AI is so important

As part of a good education in our changing world, children should learn how to apply their own developing intelligence to the artificial intelligence that’s served up to then in ever larger quantities on the internet. Students need to understand what AI is, know its limitations and learn how to evaluate it.

Virginia has wisely worked in recent years to develop strategies that help students use the internet effectively while remaining safe from its risks. A couple of bills before the legislature, including one by Democratic Del. Alex Askew of Virginia Beach, would update public schools’ internet policies to include more education about AI and the pitfalls to be aware of when using it, according to the Tribune News Service.

The need for such instruction is evident. Students should understand all the media that permeate their lives and learn how to evaluate what they read, see and hear. Digital literacy is critical because children, even at an early age, spend a great deal of time interacting with the world through screens

AI is a constant, and increasing, presence online. Having a firm grasp about its strengths and limitations will help them use it effectively as a tool — and enable them to identify scams or false information. Students also need to be aware that AI is increasingly used for cyberbullying. These platforms make it all too easy to generate realistic, convincing deepfakes and other offensive content that can spread quickly. AI cyberbullying is a threat to the mental and emotional health of the victims; young people need to know how to recognise such attacks and report them to a responsible adult.

It’s always important for children to be wary of what they see presented as fact and to determine the source, including whether the words or images were generated by AI.

Years ago, it took a while for many people to understand that just about anything, including contradictory and false information, could be found online. What appeared on the internet was — and is — only as reliable as whoever was responsible for it.

AI has supercharged that problem. Content is presented with such authority, even when it’s incorrect, that it’s easy for anyone to assume that it’s accurate. Children need to learn to determine the source and to verify. Educators also worry that relying on even accurate AI-generated information can be harmful to a child’s intellectual development, learning and creativity. Children need to learn to research for themselves, compare sources and think through a question or problem.

None of this is to say that AI doesn’t have a place in our world, or that schoolchildren shouldn’t be learning how to use it. There are jobs for which it is particularly well suited: repetitive tasks, sorting quickly through massive amounts of data and freeing human workers to spend more time on creative thinking and informed decision making. And tech companies that form the backbone of the internet are integrating models into just about everything these days.

But it’s important to remember — and teach our children — that AI is just what its name says: artificial intelligence. It’s not human. It has no emotions or sense of right and wrong. It doesn’t have experience or judgment. It can’t think. It doesn’t readily respond to suddenly changing circumstances. AI is only as good as the data that is fed into it, and it’s all too easy for unscrupulous individuals, governments and organisations to feed it false or misleading data.

Experts say AI “hallucinates,” as when it offers content that is demonstrably wrong or makes no sense — to a thinking person.

And that’s the problem. AI is not a thinking person. Virginia’s schools need to continue to teach our children to be able to think for themselves, and to understand that while AI can be, if properly vetted and managed, a useful tool, it is no substitute for informed humans, including themselves.

The legislation now before the General Assembly offers a promising approach to help our children learn what they need to know about AI — the good and the bad.