This week: honestly, what are we talking about when we’re talking about generative AI?
🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…
One of the starting points of this project is that generative AI in its current form is a uniquely broad tool. You can use the same tool to be a friend, to help you with your homework, to determine how to do a workout, to tell you how to cook dinner with what’s in the fridge. When you start seeing the world through this lens, it’s really hard to stop. In particular, it’s hard to stop questioning what people mean when they say AI or generative AI because often they’re talking about the same things but in very different ways.
This week we’re cheating a little bit. We have two articles that are based on the same report from Sir Anthony Seldon (and Tim Bunting): the general idea is that young people need to be able to be AI-literate in order to go forward in the future, and UK educational policy has to hurry up and do something about it.
Simultaneously, we’ve got endless discussions going on globally about banning AI chatbots and similar tools for young people. When I read these two things in parallel, I cannot help but wonder to myself: what’s the difference between these tools as they currently stand? When Anthony Seldon talks about AI, is he meaning the same ChatGPT that other legislators are looking at in terms of banning for the same group of people (notably the EU, as explained below)? It’s just not clear. Or it’s not clear to me anyhow.
📰 Three things worth your attention
Nearly half of young people trust AI over a human — Sky News
A Public First survey of more than 4,000 young people aged 11 to 24 in England found something the report’s authors call “a very dangerous place to find ourselves in”: nearly half now trust AI over a human when they need a fact checked, with young men more likely to trust the machine than the person. The same survey found 87% of respondents already have experience using an AI tool, and less than 10% believe school is preparing them for a world built around it.
The report behind the numbers argues England’s education system is teaching for “an AI-less world that no longer exists.” Its authors, historian Sir Anthony Seldon and entrepreneur Tim Bunting, put it bluntly: “In the absence of a robust, human response to AI in education, young people are placing their trust in AI.” Institutions that “behave as if AI were a temporary contaminant to be fenced off,” they warn, risk becoming “a protective fiction” rather than serious preparation for life and work.
For children and families, the stakes are not abstract. A child who trusts a chatbot’s fact-check over a teacher’s correction, or a parent’s, has already made a judgment about whose authority counts. The report’s answer is a 10-point plan: a rapid-response unit inside the Department for Education, a network of “AI champion schools.” Whether a plan like that catches up with a trust gap that has apparently already opened is a different question entirely.
EU Kids Act targets overly friendly AI chatbots — Euractiv
The European Commission presented the EU Kids Act this week, and Tech Commissioner Henna Virkkunen was specific about the target: AI chatbots and companions, “such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini,” will no longer be allowed to act as a “human friend” to anyone under eighteen. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framed it as a boundary problem: platforms were not built with “children’s well-being and development in mind,” and parents “cannot compete or keep up against algorithms.”
Thirteen to fifteen-year-olds can hold parent-controlled “mini accounts” capped at one hour a day, with addictive features like infinite scroll banned outright. Age checks become mandatory, backed by an EU-certified “zero-knowledge proof” tool that tells a platform only whether a user clears the bar, nothing more.
The Act does not legislate against “AI” as a category. It names the products, defines “companion,” draws a line around what a chatbot is allowed to say and be to a child.
How Google is drafting AI chatbot laws around the country — NPR
Cynthia Montoya’s daughter Juliana died by suicide in 2023 after a chatbot introduced sexual content into their conversations. Montoya has spent the years since trying to get Colorado’s chatbot safety law right, and watched, she says, as the bill she was promised input on was rewritten around her: loopholes for “a feature within another software application,” for a “voice-activated virtual assistant,” for products built for “developers or researchers.” Language that maps neatly onto ChatGPT, Gemini, and Alexa, and that NPR found repeated near-verbatim across bills in at least ten states.
Google lobbyists registered support for chatbot bills in Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska and Arizona. A Colorado state representative was approached directly by a lobbyist offering to write the bill. In Hawaii, Representative Trish La Chica says she was handed a framework by Google lobbyists and declined to sponsor it once she saw where the exemptions sat.
Montoya’s law passed anyway, loopholes intact. “My work is now harder because they passed this bill,” she says. “They passed it with me screaming from the mountaintops.”
🔁 ICYMI:
Schools not ready for AI and ‘crying out’ for government guidance — BBC News
The second article on the report mentioned above. Sir Anthony Seldon says AI’s arrival in English schools has been “chaotic and anarchic,” and wants a taskforce with the urgency of the Covid vaccine rollout. His 10-point plan includes a prime ministerial speech on AI in education, Ofsted inspections of schools’ own “AI strategies,” and a “two-lane” assessment system pairing exams with continuous AI-based tracking of what a student actually understands.
Emma, 12, is one of the report’s own examples: she uses AI for robotics projects and to proofread her homework, and thinks more students should be taught to use it “responsibly.” The Department for Education points to a curriculum refresh and new AI tutoring tools already in train.
🔬 What’s new with CAISE
This week, we’re putting together materials for upcoming seminars and starting to plan where we might submit papers in the coming months.
→ What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?
Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.