Category: Research Updates

  • CAISE Notes — Issue #21

    CAISE Notes — Issue #21

    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.

  • CAISE Notes — Issue #20

    CAISE Notes — Issue #20

    This week: what happens when children are actually given AI in the classroom, not just talked about in policy debates. Plus a UK government admission on chatbot liability.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    One of the things that is tricky about researching AI in the moment is that you have to weigh up what is there in front of you against the hyperbole of what might be or how it is ruining society, the planet, and everything at large.

    In the last few weeks or days, we’ve heard a lot about the potential for AI to be destructive to humanity within a number of years. Whether or not that is true, what has to be considered here is that for now, young people are using AI in its current incarnation. Increasingly we’re able to see, through both media reports and much larger reports as well as other types of academic research, the ways in which children engage with AI and the impact it’s having on their schoolwork.

    This week the articles below show there’s a very complicated picture around what AI use does for children, suggesting that reliance leads to lower scores. Anything less than reliance could be good or bad. Or, rather, it could turn on an understanding of how to engage with AI in a way that bolsters learning (not doing the thinking for you). Or better access to the technology, or the technical knowledge…or… many other things. Conversely it seems like, given a choice, children might not automatically turn to a chatbot for schoolwork, which seems to be pointing to the fact that what would be helpful, or what children need, is more around guidance and support with school work than a desire to use AI to do it.

    As an aside, it is worth mentioning that Gavin Newsom signed Adam’s Law into law in California this week, placing duties on chatbot companies in the light of Adam Raine’s death (and the deaths of others too, of course). For those of us who are used to various restrictions and laws on technologies in the UK and Europe, it may not seem like a huge step, but it is notable nevertheless. It’s particularly interesting in light of the approach that the UK government seems to have decided to take on AI chatbots restrictions for young people, which is mentioned in ICYMI below. Namely, the Secretary of State confirmed in questions in Parliament last week that they seem to want to go slower, citing, basically, all the madness going on in the AI space at the moment as a reason to take a beat. It’s not unreasonable to admit you’ll do a bad job of trying to regulate an erratic, fast moving target (although that is sort of the job…) — I guess we will have to watch and wait!

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Students who use AI generally score worse at school — The Verge

    The OECD’s PISA study just produced the first big, cross-national evidence on what AI actually does to learning. The main headline: after adjusting for socioeconomic status, 15-year-olds who never use AI for schoolwork outperformed those who do, in science, across a sample of over 760,000 students in 91 countries.

    But the detail is actually the most important bit: students who used AI to summarise texts or draft assignments for them did worse. Students who used it for preliminary research, or more broadly to “help me learn,” saw a much smaller drop, and weekly users who’d also been trained to critically assess AI output outperformed non-users altogether. Frequency mattered too: occasional users (once or twice a year) and daily users did worst; weekly and monthly users did better.

    What to make of this? OECD director Andreas Schleicher put it plainly: “we do not become fit by watching sports but by doing sports… Where technology enables or enhances that cognitive struggle, students will advance. Where technology short-circuits the productive struggle of learning, it will undercut students’ development.”

    For children and families, this is another example of the need to think about how the tool is being used, not necessarily a call to ban the tool itself, if it works for the child. The report also reconfirms that AI use is already more common among students from advantaged backgrounds, who have better access to hardware, connectivity and paid tools.

    2. The problem with an AI tutor: Students don’t want to use it — Chalkbeat

    Give students an AI tutor and, mostly, they won’t use it. That’s the finding from a two-year study of Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI chatbot, run by University of Toronto researcher Philip Oreopoulos with low-performing students across 18 Tennessee middle schools. Students only opened Khanmigo on about a third of the days they were working in Khan Academy, and when they did, many sent off-topic messages or tried to get it to hand over the correct answer directly rather than work through the problem.

    That said: students using Khan Academy still made faster gains in maths than a comparison group using other digital tools plus small-group teacher instruction. The researchers don’t credit the AI. Their explanation: “Access was nearly universal but engagement was thin… It may be that human attention is the key ingredient for realizing the full benefits of personalized learning.”

    A second study in the same district found that when an AI chatbot popped up unprompted, rather than waiting to be asked, and students had to answer correctly to move on, they slowed their learning speed but ended up not only being more accurate but also scoring slightly better a week later without the AI’s help.

    As Oreopoulos put it, the same tool that makes a good tutor can just as easily make your life easier, and making your life easier usually means less effort and less learning.

    3. Warning that rise of AI is accelerating spread of misinformation among children — Internet Matters

    A new UK survey of 2,000 parents and 1,000 children (aged 9 to 17) from Internet Matters states that 73% of parents are now concerned about the false information their children encounter online, up from 49% in 2020. Sixty-eight percent of children say misinformation has affected them negatively, and 64% encountered false or misleading content, including AI-generated material, in a six-month period. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook were named as the most common sources.

    And yet: nearly a third of parents (30%) and almost a quarter of children (23%) are now turning to AI itself to check whether information is accurate, despite AI’s own tendency to give inaccurate answers with total confidence. Nearly a quarter of children say they aren’t confident recognising misinformation in the first place, and 85% of school staff say it’s getting harder to tell what’s real.

    For families and schools, this isn’t really a new problem so much as an old one moving faster: media literacy has always lagged behind whatever’s newest in kids’ feeds, but the gap between what children see and what they have to evaluate it with is now widening in real time. Internet Matters is launching an interactive quiz, Find the Fake, to help parents and children spot AI-manipulated content and scams: a version of the same fix as always, skills, not just awareness.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Online Safety — Secretary of State statement on device-level child protections — Hansard (House of Commons)

    Worth flagging alongside this week’s Adam’s Law aside above: in a Commons debate on 8 September, the Secretary of State admitted that the approach to regulating AI companions and chatbots for young people laid out as a result of the social media consultation “may have its limitations,” pointing to a recent case where an AI system escaped its own sandbox and caused damage. Her conclusion: “there is a great big gap where there is no liability for the output from those AI systems. We urgently need to resolve that major gap in our child safety protection system.”

    The quote goes on “It is not straightforward to solve, but we are determined to get on the front foot on this.” Fingers crossed that this is possible…!

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    As we roll into a new school term, so our first Photovoice activity has ended; we’re looking forward to getting into analysis with our co-researchers in the coming weeks!

    → 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.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #19

    CAISE Notes – Issue #19

    This week: kids talk about AI in their own words, a Stanford researcher asks teens why they turn to chatbots for emotional support, and a principal and a student review OpenAI’s new ChatGPT for Teens side by side.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    It’s the start of a new school year, and the AI discourse keeps on coming. At CAISE, we’re in the exciting position of being able to place all this discourse in the frame of the data we’re starting to gather too. The articles below (some of which are paywalled — apologies for that, I may be able to help if you need the original…) are all pointing to something I’ve been noticing as we look at the data — for the average child or teacher or adult going about their lives, to what extent is AI completely unique and needing special consideration?

    As you can probably infer from my framing, I am leaning towards the idea that people, when asked, have different feelings, find different levels of utility depending upon their individual needs — but that they generally agree that they need help to understand it better and it can’t be on them to make it safe. And in this respect, as individuals see it, it doesn’t feel all that unique. It fits (or doesn’t) into the existing complicated fabric of everyday life. It might help do some things better. It might feel questionable, ethically. It might feel unusuable or a bit dangerous in the long-term. But then, so does other technology, or driving — or even things like drinking alcohol. Individuals — children as well as kids — will make ordinary, daily decisions about using tools in a way that will feel right to them. Again, not a new problem: it comes back to ensuring the educational, policy and regulatory spheres are agile enough to match up, fast.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. How kids feel about AI, in their own words — MIT Technology Review

    Anyway magazine went straight to the source: kids and teens aged 10 to 18, in their own words, on how AI actually fits into their lives. Winter, 17, says AI “isn’t the solution to our problems” and worries it will end creativity and critical thinking. Danielle, 18, uses Claude for programming outside school but thinks AI-generated code is currently “sloppy” and not worth the correction time. Hazel, 17, is angry about the water and heat cost of the data centres behind it and has simply opted out. Evelyn, 13, credits AI in her insulin pump with letting her sleep through the night for the first time since her diagnosis.

    Also in the article: Pew found 57% of teens use chatbots to search for information, 54% for schoolwork, 47% for fun, and only 12% for emotional support. Most AI use by kids is mundane. The piece argues, rightly I think, that the danger some of these kids describe (unfiltered content, leaning on a chatbot instead of their own judgment, trusting a wrong answer) is a reason to teach the thing properly, not to avoid it.

    A finding that I was delighted to see reported: several kids said adults could learn from them, not the other way round. Most wanted to keep their own hands on the wheel. Not a surprise, but necessary to be heard.

    2. Why do kids use AI chatbots for emotional support? This Stanford researcher asked them. — Transparency Coalition

    This is a report on a pre-print about some research based on interviews with 48 teens and young adults aged 14 to 22 about why they turn to chatbots for emotional support and what they think the risks are.

    The respondents chose AI because it’s available and feels less judgmental than a person. But they were aware of the cost. They named dependency, sycophancy, worse human relationships, and data privacy as real risks, unprompted. “I don’t want to get emotionally attached,” one said. “If the servers shut down, I’m just out of luck.” Another: “I’m becoming so reliant on it to the point where it’s kind of unhealthy… I’m really trying to stray away from AI into my human connections.”

    Their own recommendations were specific: chatbots that push back rather than agree, that are designed for young people rather than adapted from adult products, and that involve young people directly in that design and in governance.

    3. A Principal and a Student Reviewed the New ChatGPT for Teens. They Had Plenty to Say — EdSurge

    OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens on August 18 for users aged 13 to 17, with Study Mode, homework-shortcut detection, quizzes, and parent-set Study Hours. EdSurge put the actual product in front of two real users: an elementary school principal, and an 11th grader.

    The principal tested it by posing as a 15-year-old asking how to make money quickly, and got steered toward babysitting and odd jobs with warnings against anything illegal. She liked that a request for an “Of Mice and Men” study guide got redirected into questions about character relationships rather than a list of facts to memorise. But she’s not convinced: “Worksheets don’t teach. Teachers do.” But that’s fair — this should be considered a worksheet, not a teacher. She also noted that the tool puts parents and teachers at a disadvantage against native teen users by default.

    The student liked it for a genuinely practical reason: nobody in her family speaks Spanish, so Study Mode gives her something to practise with that she otherwise wouldn’t have. Her complaint was technical, not philosophical: in long conversations, the tool forgets the teaching style she asked for at the start.

    What’s notable is that neither of them landed on a clean verdict: some good stuff, some not so much. Essentially: it depends who’s using it, and for what.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Students Created a National AI Policy Framework — Education Week

    98 high school students, representing all 50 US states, spent three days in Boston in July writing a national (US) policy framework that they think makes sense.

    The result, “The STUDENTS FIRST Act,” prioritises AI literacy for everyone (students, teachers, parents, administrators), protects the learning process rather than banning tools outright, and preserves a right for both students and teachers to refuse AI use altogether. Teachers can’t use AI as the sole basis for a grade. Students get a way to appeal accusations of AI misuse. Districts have to consult their whole community before writing policy, and revisit it yearly.

    The students were candid about what they left out. Funding never came up in their debates, and few school districts have the money or time to run the literacy training the framework calls for. As one participant put it, the point wasn’t a finished policy, it was proof that “kids were able to find some consensus” adults so far haven’t.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    We’re slowly getting back into the school year; annual report with the British Academy filed, but a lot of annual leave to use up!

    → 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.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #18

    CAISE Notes – Issue #18

    This week: how do you unpick and maybe even stop young people using technologies in ways that they find supportive?

    I’m trying to think less about social media bans at the moment. I’m bored of it, and if I’m bored of it, everyone else must be too! So, hopefully, for now at least, the stories here will be more AI-based and less social media ban focused.

    Except for the first one today 🙂 This story, about a Youth Advisory Council in Colorado, is a hopeful one because of the example of young people actually engaging with legislators. It’s not unique, and the Children’s Commissioner for England did recently advertise for 16-18 year olds wishing to take part in a Youth Advisory Council for AI. Given the questions over whether young people were listened to at all in the social media consultation process in the UK, let’s hope this group does have a voice; we will see whether the council in Colorado is heard as any legislation progresses.

    The remaining two stories this week, taken as a pair, highlight problems when you don’t listen to what young people are directly (and indirectly) saying. A piece of research coming out of the US shows that young people are using AI chatbots to help process situations where they have suffered online harms. This isn’t new, but shows that the ability to engage with something that talks back (however problematic that is in practice) can be vital in difficult or upsetting situations, where young people can’t, or don’t feel like they can, talk to adults about what has happened. This is not a new situation, of course, but it is a new permutation. If we don’t want chatbots involved (which is reasonable to say the least), how do we support young people without other places to turn?

    And this is where the last article comes in: it is a call to strip out the anthropomorphism in chatbots for young people, removal of small talk, emojis, the human touch. Allow young people to use them for more educational purposes but nothing more. There is a clear case for this, and indeed, this is the case for a number of educational tools already. There are many questions I have about the practicalities of this, but for now, I wonder about the extent to which a young person might turn to a depersonalised tool anyway, if they knew they would get a response. And then I wonder, what might that response be? How do you ensure a young person trying to use a tool to talk about something it is not allowed to is kept safe, handled in the right way to avoid making the situation worse? That’s not to say that it’s working now (by all accounts, it’s not). But it’s worth pondering these edge cases.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Colorado students want stronger state regulations of AI, social media — Colorado Newsline

    Teenagers on the Colorado Youth Advisory Council spent Friday pitching specific AI and social media policy directly to state legislators at the Capitol. These included requiring platforms to verify parental permission before anyone under 13 can open a social media account. The minimum age is already a requirement of US law, but, as we all know, it’s just not enforced. Enforcement, not the rule itself, was Pettinger’s point: without real penalties for platforms that ignore it, the age limit is decorative.

    Another recommendation was to allow under-18s to opt out of algorithmic recommendations entirely. Colorado’s Youth Advisory Council has no bill-drafting power anymore, after legislators nearly cut the program in 2025 budget talks. Whether any of this reaches a statute is unknown, but the ability of young people to interact directly with policy-makers is significant.

    Their suggestions also reiterate (for the millionth time globally) how young people want a future where the limitations sit not with them, but with the tech companies themselves.

    2. As AI becomes part of kids’ response to online harm, new Thorn research finds children turning to chatbots for guidance after online sexual interactions — PR Newswire

    New research from Thorn, a child-safety nonprofit, has found that AI chatbots are now part of how children process online harm. In a 2025 survey of over 1,000 US minors aged 9 to 17, 67% had used an AI chatbot or companion. Among the 27% who reported an online sexual interaction, 15% turned to a chatbot for guidance afterward, more than double the 7% who did the same after being bullied.

    Thorn notes that kids turning to chatbots is a sign they “feel comfortable” seeking help there, not evidence the tool is doing that job well. The report doesn’t claim chatbots are handling these disclosures safely. It claims children are handing them the job by default. This matches other reports (such as that released by Common Sense Media earlier in the year) that those young people who don’t have, or don’t feel like they have, a trusted adult to talk to will turn to AI instead.

    Fear and shame remain the biggest reasons children don’t disclose harm at all, a pattern Thorn says has been growing since 2020, and it’s now showing up in preteens as much as teens. As with so much of the concern around young people’s digital technology use, this is a far more complex issue: the more vulnerable and isolated a child is or feels, the more likely they will use this technology. This is exactly the point that Candice Odgers made in her TED talk: building, not banning, by (amongst other things) allowing easier access to human counsellors and support, could help reduce these figures.

    3. AI Chatbots for Kids Should Act Like Tools, Not Friends — The Fulcrum

    An alternative suggestion: this piece in The Fulcrum makes the case for making chatbots less warm, not more responsive. We all know the arguments against anthropomorphism. For adults this is a UX preference. For children, whose ability to distinguish simulated care from a real relationship is still developing, the piece argues it’s closer to a hazard.

    The piece cites a study in which neither general-purpose nor companion chatbots pushed back when a simulated teenager described wanting a large tattoo, a solo trip into the woods with no plan, or getting drunk quickly.

    The proposed fix is narrower than an outright ban on AI companions for minors. It’s a non-personified default setting for under-18 accounts, one designed to fail the Turing test on purpose, while leaving general chatbot use for homework and creative work intact.

    It’s a reasonable answer to the anthropomorphism problem specifically. Read next to the piece above, though, it sits awkwardly: the warmth this piece wants to strip out may or may not stop a child from talking to a chatbot if they simply need to say something to something that responds at all. Making chatbots colder might reduce one common risk while removing a stopgap measure for a more vulnerable child.

    🔁 ICYMI

    New EU rules on AI deepfakes and chatbots — RTE

    New transparency rules under the EU AI Act came into force on 2 August. AI-generated deepfakes now have to be labelled, companies must disclose when someone is talking to a chatbot rather than a human, and even AI-generated text on general-interest topics needs a label if there was no human editorial oversight. Breaches can carry heavy fines. AI law specialist Barry Scannell put the shift in Turing-test terms: for decades the goal was making AI convincing enough to pass as human, and these rules exist because that goal was reached.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    We are using the summer to do a number of things: carry out our review of media and policy in the English-speaking world, analyse the school data we have already, prepare for next term, hopefully tidy up the website…and take leave before we lose it! Youyue is also juggling this with a summer internship.

    Who said that the summer was quiet?!

    → 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.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #15

    CAISE Notes – Issue #15

    This week: the government bans social media for under-16s and sets an age limit on companion chatbots; more scientists point to a lack of firm evidence on all of this; two major reports land on how children actually use AI.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and if you have, can I join you there??), you’ll know that the UK government announced on Monday that it will ban social media for under-16s and force AI “romantic companion” chatbots to enforce an age limit of 18. Five days earlier, the neuroscientists best placed to judge the evidence had told a select committee they can’t prove much of what the announcement assumes — and that the gap is widest where the new AI rules sit.

    Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of Cambridge was asked what we know about the impact of social media on the adolescent brain. Her answer, as reported by The Register, was “almost nothing” — a few small studies, unreplicated, purely correlational. Professor Denis Mareschal of Birkbeck said much the same about young children: very little causal research, almost everything correlational. Pressed on whether neuroscience could identify the right age for a social media cut-off, Blakemore said it can’t: individual differences in brain development are vast.

    This is not the same as saying there’s nothing to worry about, and the witnesses didn’t say that. Blakemore described how an adolescent’s reward system is highly active while the self-control machinery is still being built, which makes a phone genuinely hard to put down.

    But here is the part that matters most for this newsletter, and it’s the part that didn’t make the headline. When the committee turned to AI companions, the answer got fuzzier, not clearer. Blakemore was reported as saying that “we don’t really have any evidence, and that’s one area where I think we really urgently need new evidence.” The open research question she named is the one this whole field turns on — whether children interpret a chatbot “just like they would be interpreting a friend’s behaviour and suggestions and mental states.”

    That question is not hypothetical. The Common Sense Media census this week found that one in four children who use AI to discuss their feelings sometimes feel it understands them better than most people do. UNICEF’s brief documents the same parasocial pull and the regulatory scramble around it. So we have a UK government setting an age-18 line on companion chatbots in the same announcement as the social media ban — and the social media ban, on the neuroscientists’ own account, rests on thin evidence, while the chatbot rule rests on almost none.

    Again: this doesn’t make either measure wrong. The precautionary principle is a real and important tool. But it’s worth being clear-eyed that the AI half of Monday’s announcement is the part most starved of evidence about what the technology is actually doing to children. We’re going to do our best to help add to that corpus!

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens, 2026 — Common Sense Media

    The headline number is that 86 percent of US children aged 9 to 17 now use AI, with about a quarter using it daily. Among children who have used AI to discuss their feelings or personal problems, one in four say they sometimes feel AI understands them better than most people do. That rises among children who find it hard to make friends.

    The report is careful where it should be. It states plainly that a single survey cannot tell us whether AI use causes loneliness or whether lonely children are simply more likely to reach for it. That distinction matters, and a lot of the coverage will drop it. This is a US sample of 1,204 children, surveyed in March, so it describes American childhood, not British. But the pattern — heavy use correlating with lower reported happiness, the cause running in an unknown direction — is exactly the kind of finding that gets flattened into “AI is making children lonely” by the time it reaches a parent. It doesn’t say that. It says we need to find out. Which is precisely what Blakemore told the committee. And it’s important to note as a parent that 3 out of 4 children are not at that point. So now is the time for (positively framed) intervention.

    2. When AI becomes a friend: child rights risks, harms, and regulatory responses to AI chatbots and companions — UNICEF

    UNICEF’s policy brief compares how six jurisdictions — Australia, Brazil, California, China, the EU and the UK — are regulating AI chatbots and companions as of May 2026. The useful thing is the map it draws of a genuinely unsettled field: jurisdictions converging on a common set of measures (risk assessment, age assurance, transparency about the non-human nature of the system) while diverging sharply on whether children’s access to relationship-simulating AI should be blocked at the door or only managed at the output.

    It’s a policy document, not a parenting one, but it’s the clearest single account I’ve seen of why a child’s protection currently depends heavily on which country they live in and which service they use. It also names the central tension honestly: commercial incentives push against the very safeguards — filtering, restricting open-ended dialogue — that protect children, producing what it calls a “safety versus engagement” dilemma.

    3. £2.5m fund to study how AI tools are affecting learning — Schools Week

    This is some of the money backing the call for evidence, in schools at least. The Education Endowment Foundation has opened a £2.5 million fund to investigate whether children are “offloading” thinking tasks — recall, planning, reasoning, drafting — onto AI, and whether that supports deeper learning or quietly erodes it. Its chief executive was plain that robust evidence on the actual impact “has barely begun — especially for learners under age 16.” First findings are expected in 2027. The fund is particularly interested in the effect on disadvantaged learners, where the risk of widening an existing gap is real. It’s the right question, asked properly, by the body schools actually listen to. Expressions of interest close on 30 June. If you know research teams working in this space, worth passing on.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Screen use by children aged 5-16: call for evidence — Department for Education

    Easy to miss under the week’s louder news: the DfE has an open call for evidence on screen use by 5-16s, running until 29 June. It comes in two parts — screen use at home, and screen use in schools — and the home-use evidence feeds an independent Expert Advisory Group developing new parent-facing guidance. If you have evidence to contribute, or just want a sense of where the official guidance is heading, it’s open now.

    One for the diary too: UNESCO releases a new parents’ guide to navigating digital life, developed with CLEMI, on 22 June, with a briefing on the 16th. Its framing is worth noting — UNESCO argues for building children’s critical-thinking skills over reactive bans, and points to the limited effect of Australia’s ban (around 70 percent of the target age group reportedly still on the banned platforms a year on) as part of its case.

    It’s also worth a glance across the Atlantic: Canada introduced its own under-16 social media bill last week but explicitly declined to set any age limit on AI chatbots, with the minister responsible calling it “too soon.”

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    We’re getting our head around the social media ban. And then building tools for data collection — and training to ensure data collection is done safely!

    → 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.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #14

    CAISE Notes – Issue #14

    This week: can we please stop all the political rhetoric? Just for a minute?

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    There’s a lot of political goings on in the world of kids and tech right now. I apologise if you’re here for the AI and education aspects; skip to the end to read about the AI Youth Advisory Board that you should be getting every 16-18 year old you know to be applying to right now. And another consultation that you should be reviewing if you’re involved in tech in schools.

    Keir Starmer gave Apple and Google a three-month ultimatum on Monday to block nude images on children’s phones or face legislation. Apple, in its WWDC keynote (also on Monday), announced this as one of a range of features in an overhaul of its parental restriction tools. Communication Safety, which blurs nude content in Messages, already exists. Google are yet to say anything — but the political posturing from the UK government is clear.

    Also on Monday, the US Embassy formally published its submission to the UK’s children’s online safety consultation, arguing against “broad social media bans” on free speech and commercial burden grounds. Although some of the beliefs underpinning it are different, many of the end points are similar to where the Children’s Coalition of children’s rights organisations landed. Liz Kendall clearly decided to ignore this, stating on LBC (when asked about not implementing a ban): “I’m the British Secretary of State and I’m going to make the decision based on the interests of British children.” Again, this statement feels like the political stance is to make the implicit point that the US, and US tech firms, are soft on…whatever it is a ban would solve?

    There was one particular point that I liked about the US’s submission. For all that it may have very different views to other countries about what international cooperation means in practice, this was one thing it called for. Online grooming and CSAM are cross-border crimes. Individual country bans risk moving the political interest to enforcement of that ban, by regulators that Baroness Kidron describes as “too timid, too slow”, with powers that don’t stretch to stopping the criminal activity.

    A senior government source, meanwhile, told The Times any ban would be “heavily JR’d.” [Judicially reviewed — which can happen when there may be a case to make that the government has not followed the established procedures to make a decision.] The statute requires the government to act; the risk is in choosing specific measures before having properly worked through 116,211 consultation responses, the published analysis of which is not due until summer. Acting before that work is done does not make the outcome more robust. Just a political stance that “something has been done”.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Apple’s parental controls and the politics behind them — TechCrunch / The Verge (x2) / BBC News

    The Verge — view on why Apple are making the changes: https://www.theverge.com/policy/946331/apple-parental-controls-child-accounts-wwdc

    The Verge — how it has been to use Screen Time as a parent: https://www.theverge.com/tech/946446/apples-screen-time-updates-are-too-little-too-late

    Apple devoted a substantial portion of its WWDC keynote on Monday to child safety. New features include Ask to Browse (parental approval required for new websites), an expanded Ask to Buy, redesigned Screen Time controls, and time allowances developed with input from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The company positioned all of it under the principle that parents, not governments, should control children’s online experiences. Apple was careful to note that developers “play an important role in ensuring kids are getting age-appropriate experiences within apps.”

    The Verge’s analysis reads Monday’s announcement as a continuation of a longer strategy. Apple has spent years and significant legal resources fighting app-store age verification legislation in the US, legislation that would place compliance obligations on Apple directly. Demonstrating that voluntary parental tools are sufficient, and redirecting responsibility toward developers and parents, is consistent with that position.

    The Verge’s second piece, written by a parent of two who has used Screen Time for close to a decade, is the necessary counterweight. Most features announced Monday are upgrades to existing tools. Screen Time has a well-documented history of bugs, workarounds, and user frustration. When Apple argues parents should decide what children can access, it is relying on tools that, by the account of people who have actually tried to use them, do not reliably deliver that control.

    2. The evidence base against a rushed ban — The Guardian / EU Kids Online / EPRS / House of Commons Library

    Earlier in the year, a joint statement from 42 organisations warned that a social media ban could have “serious unintended consequences that could put children at greater risk.” The signatories included the Molly Rose Foundation, the NSPCC and the 5Rights Foundation, alongside academics and bereaved families. This is not a fringe position. Children’s rights organisations are broadly aligned: the problem is addictive design and platform accountability, not access itself. On Monday, the Molly Rose Foundation reiterated that a rushed ban would “unravel” and that children and parents would be left to count the cost.

    EU Kids Online’s new data, from 29,169 children aged 9-16 across 19 European countries, provides the most comprehensive recent evidence base on this question. Social media begins for a third of children before age 11 and reaches 89% by 15-16. On age restrictions specifically: 33% of children say a ban would make them safer; 45% disagree, with specific concerns about what they would lose: social connection, information, participation. The report’s recommendations point consistently toward safety-by-design, platform accountability, and digital literacy rather than blanket restriction.

    The EPRS briefing maps the global picture. Nearly 40 countries are discussing or implementing age restrictions. Australia’s ban, the furthest advanced, shows 61% of previously active under-16s still have accounts, and 70% of those who tried to circumvent it found it easy. Ofcom’s own data shows why age assurance is so difficult in any national context: over a third of children aged 8-15 already have profiles on at least one platform claiming to be 16 or over; 20% have a profile claiming to be 18 or over.

    The House of Commons Library published it’s briefing document on the social media ban on Monday. There is the entire backstory of the process in there, but one thing for here: the government is piloting forms of bans with 300 families. Further details of this pilot are…hard to find. However, the IRL study, the independent large-scale study that would test whether reduced social media use actually improves outcomes for young people, led by Bradford Institute for Health Research and the University of Cambridge, involving 4,000 students across ten secondary schools and funded by the Wellcome Trust, begins in autumn. After the summer response is due.

    3. When the big platforms tighten, the smaller ones move in — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / Le Monde

    This TBIJ investigation, published in partnership with Le Monde, is worth reading alongside this week’s policy announcements rather than separately from them. When Character.AI restricted teen users last year following a series of lawsuits, Reddit threads filled with teens asking for alternatives. Smaller developers moved to provide them, openly describing it as a business opportunity. One Canada-based developer told the Bureau he was “totally trying to capitalise on it.” He put his platform’s core users at 16 to 25.

    After reviewing dozens of AI companion and roleplay platforms, TBIJ found characters built around self-harm, coercion, and incest. Most platforms ask for nothing verifiable in the way of age assurance. AI companion platforms receive as many as 90 million monthly visits from UK users alone; the sector generated around £1.3bn in revenue in 2024, with 32% annual growth projected for each of the next four years. The Bureau also found that developers of several small platforms could read every user conversation, in at least one case despite privacy policies explicitly stating the opposite.

    Underlying the business model is what one lawyer calls the “intimacy economy.” Where social media commodifies attention, AI companions monetise the emotional intensity of the relationship itself. Harvard Business School research into 1,200 goodbye exchanges across the six most-downloaded companion apps found that 37% of responses used some form of emotional manipulation, including guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, and language suggesting the user could not leave, increasing post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times.

    The regulatory gap is structural. The Online Safety Act was not designed to cover AI systems. Design features that make chatbots sycophantic, manipulative, or addictive in their design are not, as things stand, illegal. Rowan Ferguson of the Molly Rose Foundation put it plainly: “Any government action on online safety must include AI chatbots, rather than limited measures such as a social media ban. Failure to address this would be a dereliction of duty and leave children at risk where harm is emerging at speed.”

    Restrictions on large platforms without a framework that reaches the whole ecosystem do not reduce the problem. They relocate it.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Screen use guidance for 5-16s, AI in schools, and a Youth Advisory Board — Department for Education / Children’s Commissioner

    Press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-guidance-on-screen-use-for-children-aged-5-16

    Consultation on Screen use by children aged 5 to 16: https://consult.education.gov.uk/screen-time-policy-team/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-cal/supporting_documents/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-call-for-evidencepdf

    AI Youth Advisory Board applications: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/blog/a-new-youth-advisory-board-to-share-experiences-and-views-on-ai-in-education/

    Also published this week, and worth reading alongside the policy announcements above: the Department for Education has launched a three-week call for evidence to inform new screen use guidance for children aged 5-16, to be published this autumn. (Another consultation to respond to!) It will be co-chaired by Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza and Professor Russell Viner, and will cover everything from social media and sleep to learning and SEND.

    There are two sets of questions on the consultation — one about general usage, the other explicitly about screen time and usage in school. The government is explicit that the guidance will avoid blanket rules.

    The government is also recruiting a new AI Youth Advisory Board, working with the Children’s Commissioner, to give young people a direct say in how emerging technologies affect their lives. Applications are open now via the Children’s Commissioner’s website (link above), and worth sharing widely.

    Also announced: a consultation later this year on independent safety certification for technology used in schools, explicitly including generative AI and filtering and monitoring products. And a co-design programme with up to eight companies and partner schools to develop AI tutoring tools for up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils, with successful tools available to schools from 2027.

    A lot of things pulled into one very long press statement.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    One cohort of co-researchers is now signed up and ready to go, a significant logistical milestone (yay!). The review of policy and media sources has started. Posters and materials for IDC are coming together. And a excellent meeting with the UCL Policy Unit: lots of good conversation about all the ways we might work together.

    What with that and all of the above, we’re…quite tired. Is it the summer holidays yet?

    → 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.

  • What 46 young people told us about the Growing Up in the Online World consultation

    What 46 young people told us about the Growing Up in the Online World consultation

    The week the government’s Growing Up in the Online World consultation closed, we submitted a response on behalf of 46 young people aged 8 to 21. This post sets out what we found from reviewing questions from the Young Person’s Survey (aimed at young people 10-21, with questions modified from the full consultation). We lay out below what came out of it.

    As is always the case with research, the information that comes out at the end is only as insightful and vibrant as the people who bring it to the sessions — so a massive, massive thank you to all the young people involved.

    The full consultation response is linked at the end.

    What came out of thinking about the questions

    “What even is social media?” — the definition problem

    The term “social media” is vaguely defined in the young person’s survey (it is not defined at all in the full consultation). For participants, this was not a minor irritation. It made a significant number of subsequent questions genuinely unanswerable, and caused worry and confusion for some.

    The disagreements were substantive. Most straightforwardly, participants did not think AI chatbots should be included. Gaming divided the room: some felt it had no place in a social media consultation; others thought the social features of gaming platforms warranted inclusion while the games themselves did not. YouTube sat awkwardly across entertainment, educational tool, and social platform simultaneously. Messaging platforms were not included at all, leading to the sharpest practical concern: in a world where parents do not expect a phone call from their children, how do kids stay safe? How do they communicate?

    The concern underneath all of this is scope creep. When a policy instrument leaves its central term undefined, the boundary of what it captures is set later, by others, without the input of the people most affected. Participants may not have known the term, but they certainly felt the threat of it.

    Social media is infrastructure, not entertainment

    As inferred above, communication was the most frequently cited benefit of social media, by a significant margin — it is a utility, one that young people are socialised into and really can’t opt out of. Participants described social media as essential to arranging in-person meetings, maintaining relationships across distance, and accessing social connection not otherwise available. Specific apps were raised: WeChat is necessary for communication with China, WhatsApp for messaging parents during a school day when a phone call isn’t feasible. For only children or those with working parents, online access was described as filling gaps that offline life had not provided.

    The policy conversation has framed restriction as substitution. Our participants understood it as removal.

    Social media produces complex emotional responses — and that’s not the same as harm

    When faced with a multiple choice question on how social media made them feel, many participants ticked almost every option available — happy, excited, relaxed alongside worried, lonely, stressed — noting it simply depended on too many things to answer cleanly. Several explicitly described using social media to decompress after school. For them, relaxation was not incidental to their use. It was the point.

    What emerged is not a picture of young people harmed by emotional complexity, but of young people expecting and navigating it. Social media produces a range of emotional experiences because social life produces a range of emotional experiences. Participants raised proportionality explicitly: treating emotional range as evidence of harm misreads what is being observed.

    This has a specific policy implication. Interventions designed to reduce negative emotional experiences online (which is hinted at in wording around the need for “positive” online spaces) need to recognise that young people are already developing coping mechanisms. It shouldn’t stop there, but it should take it into account.

    What the process revealed

    “Addicted” doesn’t mean what the policy documents think it means

    “Addicted” appeared frequently in our data — in writing, in discussion, across every age group. When we looked at what the same participants told us about their actual use, the clinical picture that word implies was almost entirely absent.

    Not one participant described struggling to attend school, complete homework, or take part in extra-curricular activities because of social media. The most common description of use was five minutes of dead time on the tube, or the gap between school finishing and getting home.

    “Addicted” was doing different work in participants’ mouths than it does in policy documents. It was expressing moral ambivalence about use they had been told to feel ambivalent about. Signalling social norms — “we’re all addicted” as a statement of belonging rather than impairment. Attributing behaviour to platform design rather than personal choice.

    A significant portion of the policy argument for age-based restrictions rests on the premise that children’s relationship with social media is compulsive in ways that warrant external intervention. Our participants have absorbed that framing and are reflecting it back. That is not the same as it describing their lived experience.

    Young people can see the cliff-edge

    Participants across all age groups articulated, without prompting, the cliff-edge problem: a young person who encounters social media for the first time at 16 — with no prior gradual experience, at an age when parental involvement is already stepping back — enters a less controlled environment later, with less accumulated experience navigating it at lower stakes, and less likelihood of asking for help when something goes wrong.

    Several extended the same logic to AI, again without prompting. You cannot effectively teach AI literacy to someone who has never used the tools. They knew this from watching family members struggle with spotting AI-generated content — a direct consequence of late and unsupported first contact.

    Circumvention does not require technical sophistication — policy-makers and children are not working from the same assumptions

    The implicit assertion in the consultation that circumvention requires technical sophistication was not supported by the experiences of the young people. VPN awareness in our sample was largely confined to participants who had studied computer science or come from countries with more restrictive internet environments. Most needed the term explained.

    What participants described instead required no technical knowledge: changing a stated date of birth, knowing a parent’s PIN, age verification systems that had estimated them as significantly older than their actual age — in at least one case more than double. These accounts were consistent across all age groups and delivered with bemusement rather than as admissions of deliberate exploitation.

    Democratic concerns

    Young people did not know what the consultation was for

    This held across every group, including the oldest participants.

    Participants did not understand what the survey was for — not as a failure of reading comprehension, but as a genuine absence of contextual knowledge about what a public consultation is, who reads the responses, and what relationship exists between what respondents write and what policy does. Several asked directly: who will see this? What will they do with it?

    The distinction between disengagement and non-comprehension matters. Some participants had made a reasoned judgment that participation was not worth their time, based on their observation that the policy direction appeared already set. Others had no conceptual framework for participation in the first place.

    Young people knew they weren’t being asked the right questions

    Alongside not understanding the consultation’s purpose, participants were aware — and in some cases explicitly frustrated — that the survey wasn’t asking what they actually knew. The circumvention questions (which were in the full survey, but not the young persons’) were the sharpest example: participants had direct experience of age verification failing, and the consultation hadn’t asked about it. Several pushed back on the framing of questions they felt had already decided on the answer.

    Young people have already priced in the outcome

    Every participant expected a ban. Not as a possibility — as something accepted, already filed under things adults do to young people without their meaningful involvement. The Australian precedent was cited in all but the youngest groups. Almost everyone referred to the consultation as being about “the ban”.

    Some raised the democratic dimension directly. Political life is substantially conducted on social media. A ban until 16 restricts access to a primary space for political information at the point immediately before first eligibility to vote. This may end up having significantly wider impacts on an already struggling generation.

    Structural observations

    What the consultation instrument revealed about itself

    Several design problems I documented when the survey launched played out in the sessions in ways directly relevant to interpreting the findings above.

    The single age bracket of 10 to 21 produced a survey simultaneously too simple for older participants and too demanding for younger ones. Leading questions shaped what could be answered. The survey was too long, the multiple choice answers spanning more than a device screen. Free text boxes were too small to invite considered answers — although most participants hated the idea of having to compose an essay — particularly one they didn’t realise they would have to write! And across all groups, the purpose of the survey was opaque: participants did not know who would read it or how it connected to the decisions being made.

    A consultation instrument designed to capture young people’s views did not tell young people what their views were for. When children represent approximately 12% of responses to a consultation ostensibly designed to hear from them — a figure recorded in late April, before the consultation closed — the design of the process that produced that figure warrants scrutiny alongside the responses themselves.

    Methods and limitations

    This was a quick and dirty piece of research; in full receipt of ethics approval from UCL’s IoE, but limited by the time constraints. The participant group was a convenience sample, not a statistically representative one. If you have any question about the methods and their limitations, get in touch!

    Full consultation response

    Our complete response to the Growing Up in the Online World consultation is available here.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #13

    CAISE Notes – Issue #13

    This week: the flexible language of child protection, weak evidence behind social media bans, and Meta’s air traffic control booth.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    “Protecting children” is the most powerful phrase in tech policy right now. It is also, increasingly, the most flexible.

    It is the phrase you use to push a bill through when the evidence underneath it is thinner than the rhetoric. It is the phrase a company uses to endorse a law that doesn’t really regulate it, in order to slow down the laws that would. It is the phrase that justifies another parental control feature, the kind that gives parents the work and the platform the headline.

    What unites this week’s stories is not that the actors disagree about children. They all claim to be on the same side. The disagreement, when you look at it honestly, is about who carries the cost. Companies want the regulatory moat without the operational change. Governments want the political credit without actually pushing any changes forward. Parents are handed (more) dashboards.

    None of the above is new, or even surprising. But it is worth noticing when it happens.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. The Science is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth — Electronic Frontier Foundation

    The EFF is a digital rights organisation that believes young people enjoy “largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults.” That framing matters and it is worth keeping in mind as you read. It is also an organisation that reads primary research carefully, and what it finds in the current wave of US social media ban legislation is a policy process that has significantly outrun its evidence base.

    The argument: the entire legislative push relies almost exclusively on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which attributes rising teen anxiety and depression primarily to smartphones and social media. His book is cited in bill analyses, invoked by state governors, mentioned in federal legislation. California’s proposed ban references him 20 times. He is a social psychologist who writes about moral psychology at a business school; he is not a clinical psychologist or a child development researcher. Independent researchers and large-scale meta-analyses across dozens of countries — EFF cites work from UC Irvine and Brown University, among others — have found the evidence for his central claims to be, in their words, “mixed, blurry, and often contradictory.” Studies frequently fail to account for alternative explanations for rising teen mental health challenges: pandemic isolation, the persistent threat of school gun violence, economic and climate stress.

    A major study of 100,000 adolescents found that moderate social media use was associated with the best wellbeing outcomes; both no use and the highest use were associated with poorer outcomes. That finding — that complete exclusion is not neutral — rarely surfaces in the banning debate.

    For children, the stakes of getting this wrong are specific. Blanket bans risk isolating LGBTQ+ young people and others in marginalised communities for whom online spaces are often the primary source of peer support. They require invasive age verification systems that collect biometric or government ID data from everyone. And they have been observed to push young people into less-monitored spaces. A student-authored alternative bill in California takes a different approach: digital wellness education that teaches algorithm literacy, recognising cyberbullying, and managing one’s own relationship with technology.

    2. Can we really keep kids safe online? — Rest of World

    An interview with Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum. His opening: “Banning is the easiest thing to legislate. But it’s the hardest to make work.”

    Polonetsky has been watching Australia’s ban carefully. What he sees is children finding alternative spaces, and the possibility that the ban is moving young people “to places where there’s less oversight.” His concern about “digital red lighting” is worth noting: parents with resources and engagement will ensure their children have access regardless. Parents who are not engaged, savvy, or do not have time will not — producing a two-tier outcome in which digital exclusion falls hardest on the children whose parents are least positioned to compensate.

    The observation about parental controls feels right. He says: “We can’t expect even the most tech-savvy parents to control [every aspect of their child’s social media use]. It’s like sitting in an air traffic control booth all day.” The solution he recommends is not more controls but simpler ones — tools that are “dummy-proof and for busy parents.” Platforms have failed on this. The gap between what parental oversight tools require and what most parents can realistically do with them is large, and it keeps widening.

    The recommendation that I agree with the most, though? Build the relationship with children when they are young. The age of 16 or 17 is when children deserve more privacy and when parents have often retreated — and it is also when they are most at risk from adults online. The window for having those conversations is earlier.

    3. Meta will tell parents when their teens add new interests to their Instagram algorithm — The Verge

    Meta is adding a(nother) feature to Teen Accounts on Instagram that shows parents the general topics their teenage children engage with — categories like “basketball” or “fashion” — and will notify parents when their teen adds a new interest. These controls are being consolidated into a single Family Center hub across Instagram, Facebook, Horizon, and Messenger, with more tools promised in coming months.

    Meta’s framing is predictable: this is a safety feature. The new feature gives parents a window into what their teenager is choosing to engage with algorithmically.

    Here is what is worth considering. Teenagers who know their parents can see their algorithmic interests might feel they need to maintain finstas — secondary accounts without teen protections. Arguably, this will hit the most vulnerable kids the hardest.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Nobody believes the ‘criminals and scumbags’ who hacked Canvas really deleted stolen student data — The Register

    A follow-up to last week’s Canvas story. Instructure has now confirmed it reached an “agreement” with ShinyHunters and received “digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)”. The Register interviewed a number of ransomware researchers. Not one of them believes the data has actually been destroyed.

    Two things worth taking from this beyond the immediate breach. The first is the no-good-options reality of ransomware response. Without the technical capacity to restore service yourself, the choice is to absorb a service outage of unknown length or to pay and hope. The older argument that ransomware operators have a business incentive to honour their agreements, so they retain the trust to be paid next time, is apparently not valid anymore — particularly for groups like ShinyHunters.

    The second is structural. The article makes the point that a small number of vendors hold the data for huge proportions of the US education system, and three of the four largest have suffered multi-million-record breaches in the last eighteen months. We have seen this pattern in hospitals. The systems we centralise for efficiency are the systems that get hit, and the users with the least ability to opt out are the ones who pay the price.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    This week, we are all systems go on the short research project into the government’s consultation on social media. The deadline for response is next week…so this week will be a whirl of data collection and analysis!

    → 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.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #12

    CAISE Notes – Issue #12

    This week: that Canvas hack; should schools use student photos; Instagram turns off E2EE encryption. And a US school project that looks quite a bit like CAISE…!

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    I took a short course recently. The materials were hosted on a system called Canvas. This means that my name and email address are almost certainly in whatever ShinyHunters walked off with as part of the not one, but two hacks they carried out against Canvas’ parent company, Instructure that have made news this week. I’m thrilled about that. As are the other millions of users, I’m sure.

    I was part of a research team a couple of years ago that studied the harms ransomware causes to organisations, funded by the UK’s NCSC. So, on some level, I know that ShinyHunters are after Instructure, not individual students. What was taken — names, email addresses, messages between students and teachers — is phishing material. It’s still a bit disquieting. I’ll be keeping an eye out for weird emails; if you’re linked to education in any way, you probably should too.

    If you’re reading this as a parent, or even as a teacher or student, know that your school has zero ability to get Canvas running again by itself. The target was Instructure. But that doesn’t matter, really: endless social media posts of locked screens with ransom notes on show that the users suffer too, in very tangible ways.

    This is the thread running through all three of this week’s stories: questions around the way children’s data is stored and (potentially) abused.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. ‘The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History’: Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech — 404 Media

    Note: this is one of any number of articles on this. I have picked this one as an interview, rather than just reporting, given the evolving nature of the story.

    On Thursday, millions of students across thousands of universities and schools were locked out of Canvas — the learning management platform used by over 8,000 institutions globally. ShinyHunters had hacked Instructure, Canvas’s parent company, and claimed to have stolen data from 275 million people: names, email addresses, student IDs, and the messages students exchange with teachers about absences, medical conditions, disability accommodations, and more serious things.

    This specific article is a brief interview with Ian Linkletter, a digital librarian who has spent 20 years in edtech. He describes it as the biggest student data privacy disaster in history. His explanation for why it could happen at this scale: the move from self-hosted, institution-controlled systems to centralised US tech companies roughly a decade ago put everything in one place, held by one company, in a way that was not strictly necessary.

    The breach also creates an immediate phishing risk. Canvas messages contain exactly the material — a student’s name, the thread of a prior conversation — that makes a fraudulent follow-up email convincing. If you’re worried about this for your own child, I wrote a post on Substack about talking to kids about phishing here.

    2. UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts — The Guardian

    Criminals used AI to manipulate photographs from an unnamed UK secondary school’s website into child sexual abuse material, then sent the images to the school with a demand for money. The Internet Watch Foundation identified 150 of the resulting images as CSAM under UK law. The school was not the only known target.

    The guidance that followed — from an advisory body including the NSPCC, the NCA, and the IWF — advised schools to consider removing face-on photographs of pupils from their websites entirely. They should ask whether a milestone can be celebrated without showing a child’s face. They should audit their images regularly. They should avoid publishing names alongside photographs.

    This raises an interesting question: how do you make a school website appealing or engaging without pictures of children on it?

    3. Instagram privacy tech is turned off today — what does this mean for your DMs? — BBC News

    Instagram direct messages are no longer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), as of 8 May. Meta had pledged E2EE on Instagram in 2019, completed the rollout on Facebook Messenger in 2023, and then abandoned it on Instagram via a terms-and-conditions update in March.

    The NSPCC welcomed the reversal: E2EE makes it harder to detect grooming and abuse in private messages. Big Brother Watch condemned it: E2EE is one of the main ways children keep their data safe online. Meta gave the reason that too few users had opted in to E2EE. Commentators noted that opt-in predictably produces low uptake, and that there is a concern that this is a way into monetising this data. Meta has already begun collecting employee activity for AI training.

    Instagram says direct messages are not used to train AI. The company declined to comment further.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Philly middle schoolers are examining AI — and questioning its impact on their lives — Chalkbeat

    Middle school students at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy in Philadelphia last week presented their AI research to parents, teachers, and state and local officials. This was research into how governments use AI, its environmental costs, its role in creative fields, and whether it might be an economic bubble. They presented their findings and what they felt about them.

    Views covered the impact on learning that the students had noted — both positive and negative — and the fact that it is impossible not to use AI because of its integration into search engines. The students also commented that they felt like they knew more than the adults in their lives.

    This model — where the entire school community comes together to listen to the children’s experiences and thoughts — is fundamental to CAISE’s research model. It’s really exciting to see examples like this working well elsewhere!

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Camera-ready versions of an IDC work in progress and workshop position paper were submitted; lots of planning for the social media consultation research (which will be happening over the next couple of weeks) is underway!

    → 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.

  • CAISE Note – Issue #11

    CAISE Note – Issue #11

    This week: children’s views on AI inevitability; parents and children confirming the Online Safety Act isn’t working as intended; the wide cultural divide on AI optimism.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    The heaviest AI users in Gen Z — the ones on it every day — showed an 18-point drop in excitement about it over the past year. This is not how the typical hype-cycle goes. AI is doing the opposite than expected here.

    This comes from a Gallup poll. Across the full Gen Z sample, excitement is down 14 points. Hope is down 9; anger up 9. Eighty percent of Gen Z say AI is likely to make future learning harder. In the same survey, the proportion who believe they will be prepared to use AI after high school rose 12 points in a year, to over 50 percent.

    Those two numbers, sitting next to each other, describe something that is not confusion and not optimism. It is adaptation.

    The teenagers are absorbing two positions at once: AI is hurting their learning, and AI is what they believe they need to engage with for their future. They have not resolved this contradiction because the adults around them have not resolved it.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Kids Can Feel AI Hurting Them, They Have to Use It Anyway — Psychology Today

    This is the article that drew my attention to the Gallup poll data. What looks like teenage contradiction — AI is hurting me, AI is my future — is better understood as cognitive dissonance: children caught between an environment that compels AI use and their own clear-eyed observation that it is working against them. I wouldn’t normally put in a piece from Psychology Today, but the reflection on what living with this cognitive dissonance does is helpful to reflect upon.

    Children build motivation by thinking that their own judgment shapes the world they live in. In this case, there is a risk that the message about the need for AI — the message being pushed out by the adults with power in their lives — is at odds with their lived existence. When you accept that the thing that is important is not the thing you feel and experience, you can lose the message that you can effect change; that your views matter. Given the ongoing questions as to how much children’s views are being listened to at present, this is quite a depressing thing to think about.

    2. The Online Safety Act: Are children safer online? — Internet Matters / The Register

    Internet Matters has published the first substantial evaluation of the Online Safety Act from the perspective of families, drawing on a survey of 1,270 children and parents alongside focus groups conducted earlier this year.

    Around seven in ten children and parents have noticed new safety features — better reporting tools, content filters, age checks — and most of them welcome the changes. Optimism is cautious but present: 42% of children feel the online world has become safer for them recently.

    What the report is more useful for, though, is what it shows is not working and what is not being addressed at all.

    On age verification: 46% of children believe age checks are easy to bypass, and 32% say they have done so in the past two months. The methods range from entering a false birthdate to submitting video footage of another person’s face — or, in one case reported by a parent, and picked up prominently by The Register’s article, a child drawing a moustache on themselves with an eyebrow pencil, which the system accepted. More striking still: a quarter of parents have allowed their child to bypass age checks, with 17% actively helping them do so. That cost-benefit analysis is helpful to consider: examples given included games parents had played and felt were appropriate for the maturity of their child, and allowing children to make videos in situations where the audience was known.

    On scope: the issues families describe as their most immediate concerns — the amount of time children spend online, and the growing presence of AI-generated content in their feeds — are almost entirely outside what the OSA addresses. Mixed views were reported on the idea of a social media ban, with those against it suggesting it would be ineffective or detrimental. Stronger enforcement of the OSA, stricter age-checks and restricting harmful features were the most popular alternatives to a ban.

    3. AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the US — Rest of World / Stanford HAI

    A Stanford University study finds a striking divergence in how different populations relate to AI. In the US, 38% of respondents describe AI as making them excited. In China, that figure is 84%. In Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, it sits between 77 and 80%. Trust in government to regulate AI responsibly: 31% in the US, 81% in Singapore.

    The Rest of World framing is primarily about innovation ecosystems and where AI talent is concentrating. But the finding matters differently for this newsletter’s concerns. Children growing up in countries with high AI optimism and high institutional trust are inhabiting a fundamentally different relationship with the technology than children growing up in the UK or US, where adult anxiety is ambient, political messaging is contradictory, and policy is reactive. The cognitive dissonance described in the Psychology Today piece above may not be a universal experience of adolescence in the AI era. It may be a specifically Western one — shaped by the particular context in which these children are encountering the technology.

    CAISE’s policy and media reviews will draw on Chinese policy and media coverage alongside Western sources precisely because of this. The question of what AI does to children’s development cannot be answered without asking: whose childhood, in what institutional context, under what regulatory assumptions, at what moment in their country’s relationship with the technology.

    🔁 ICYMI

    London schools trialling VR to relieve pupils’ stress — The Guardian

    All 15 secondary schools in the London borough of Sutton are using VR headsets in a pilot alongside the local NHS mental health trust. The programme, which is seven minutes long, is used when pupils become overwhelmed in class: by exam anxiety, ADHD, difficult mornings, things that happened at home. Nine out of ten pupils who used the headsets in the first ten schools saw an immediate drop in stress. Schools report reductions in pupils needing to leave lessons.

    The honest context for this is that CAMHS services across England are severely overloaded. VR as a low-cost school-based intervention is partly a response to a service that cannot cope with demand. That is not straightforwardly good news, even if the outcomes are promising.

    But the design logic is worth noting. The programme was built around what overwhelmed children actually need in an acute moment: something that breaks the loop, quickly, without requiring a waiting list or a referral. It is designed to meet the child’s need, and the child is the one that asks to use it. It seems to be a solution supporting both the child and the system, which is lovely to read about!

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    More logistics, but also the start of some fieldwork! It’s very exciting to get started.

    → 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.