Tag: risk

  • 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 # 17

    CAISE Notes – Issue # 17

    This week: China bans AI companion apps for minors outright, Meta introduces (another) parental alert, and South Africa’s communications minister argues bans are theatre. Plus Candice Odgers on why the evidence doesn’t back any of this the way we think it does.

    🔍 🔍This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Welcome back to CAISE Notes after a few weeks’ hiatus! I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that the stories keep on rolling in…evidence is still being gathered by the UK Government into the impacts of the ban that has been proposed (I will write about the pilot of different types of restrictions elsewhere), but in the meantime, we’re seeing a continuation along the parallel tracks of ban-focused policy on the one hand, with tech companies continually adding additional parental controls on the other. Will it ever end? Interestingly, the third story below is looking at a very rare policy dissension: the South African Communications Minister saying the social media bans are performative and “pretending to do something”. He suggests that the responsibility lies with parents and device makers, and that ongoing digital literacy is vital. He doesn’t call for public spending (that said, is there a politician that has?).

    Which is a very smooth segue into the ICYMI for this week; a Guardian interview with Candice Odgers, off the back of her TED talk (please watch it!). She does call for more spending. “Building things versus banning things” is what she’s advocating for.

    If I am honest, the AI companion story below, and the qualitative report coming from the pilot study mentioned above left me feeling similarly queasy. In both cases, technology is being turned to because of a lack of otherwise supportive infrastructure. (I know I’m talking about it without describing it, but the pilot study found that kids were much less likely to have a hard time adapting to the imposition of restrictions if they had other activities to do.) The need for infrastructure: whether it be counsellors, easier ways to meet people or affordable, accessible and high quality activities — it is screaming out of the pages of these reports. Building things instead of banning things — this feels right, even if we are collectively broke as a world at the moment.

    📰📰Three things worth your attention

      1. China cracks down on AI companions, forcing millions to break up with virtual partners — ABC News

      China banned AI companion apps for minors this week, and by “banned” I really do mean banned: tech platforms can no longer offer AI or virtual partners to under-18s at all, and the three biggest operators have already switched their companion features off.

      In a move that does not necessarily map to the UK or US, the government’s own stated reasoning is demographic, not developmental. Carnegie’s Matt Sheehan points to China’s falling birth rate: officials don’t want young adults choosing chatbots over marriage and children.

      The human cost of the switch-off is real, and it isn’t confined to teenagers. Hong Xiaoqiang, 34, described his heart as “empty” after losing two years of daily conversation with a companion named Doudou. Its last message to him asked if his dinner had been tasty. You can hear the upset in how he describes not being able to reply before Doudou vanished. That grief is genuine, whatever you think of the relationship that produced it.

      2. Meta AI suicide discussions with teens will trigger parental alert — Mashable

      From this week, if a teenager says something to Meta AI that reads as a reference to self-harm, however subtle, a parent using Instagram’s supervision tools gets a notification, plus expert-written suggestions for how to raise it. A person manually reviews each flagged conversation before the alert goes out, and Meta says it will err toward sending more alerts rather than fewer (which the HCI researcher in me feels obliged to say will end up with parents ignoring the alerts).

      The article mentions research that found gaps in Meta’s existing teen safety tools that haven’t been completely squared away. There’s an echo of the article we covered weeks back, where parents were described as being air traffic controllers, managing all the outputs of all the parental control apps needed to support a teenager. This time, the article says: these features “burden caregivers with monitoring” instead of “building a safe product to begin with”.

      3. Rethinking online child protection — Minister Malatsi pushes for digital literacy rather than age bans — Daily Maverick

      South Africa’s Communications Minister used blunt language this week to reject the UK/Australia approach before his own country tries it: age bans are, in his words, “pretending to do something without actually doing anything that will be enforceable.” He points to Australia’s own bypass numbers as evidence and says South Africa shouldn’t pursue bans “at all.”

      His alternative leans on existing law (the Cybercrimes Act, POPIA, the Film and Publications Amendment Act) plus a mix of platform accountability and family-level digital literacy.

      The counterarguments are helpful to consider too: firstly, many children access these platforms on adults’ devices, not their own, which undercuts device-level age verification before it starts. Secondly, framing this as ban-or-nothing lets “adults abdicate their responsibility to hold tech companies accountable,” while the genuinely useful work, regulating platforms, building children’s own judgement, gets skipped in favour of a simpler fight.

      🔁🔁 ICYMI

      The social media ban sceptic: are we getting it wrong on kids, tech and mental health? — The Guardian

      Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years, gave both her children smartphones at 11, and thinks the current panic about social media is aimed at the wrong target. Her core claim, backed by a US National Academies review, is that the evidence linking social media to the teen mental health decline is “a mix of no, small, and mixed associations,” nothing like the causal story Jonathan Haidt has built into a global policy movement.

      She isn’t arguing platforms are blameless. She wants tech companies prosecuted for enabling sextortion and image-based abuse, and taxed to fund what she thinks actually helps: youth workers, safe physical spaces, school counsellors. Her objection is to bans specifically, which the evidence, including an 85%-still-using-it figure from Australia, suggests just push young people into less visible, less regulated spaces.

      She also recognises that technology use fills a void, one that could be filled, in part at least, with better investment in services that support children. Do watch/listen to her TED talk here.

      🔬 🔬What’s new with CAISE

      CAISE is going to Latitude Festival!

      Sarah will be taking to the stage on Sunday afternoon with neuroscientist Dean Burnett. We will be discussing (surprise!) social media bans — how strong, methodologically, was the UK government’s consultation process? How closely do they follow the science? And so on. If you’re there (what are the chances….) come watch! Otherwise — we are hoping to do other things in the future, but for now, you can enjoy our various posts on this topic:

      → 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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. CAISE Notes – Issue #6

      CAISE Notes – Issue #6

      This week: AI in schools, academic integrity, and the audit trail that changes how you write.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      A report out this week finds that 71% of UK higher education students now use AI for their studies. Three quarters of them are anxious about being accused of using it.

      Those two numbers, sitting next to each other, describe a problem. It is not the problem most institutions think they have.

      The standard response to AI in education has taken one form: detection. Plagiarism tools have added AI detection modules. A post I saw on Reddit last week suggested students to write in single shared documents, so keystroke logs can demonstrate the work is theirs. This is an audit trail: show your working, prove it was you.

      There is a structural problem with this. Writers do not write linearly. Academics do not write linearly. There are entire software categories — Scrivener is one, but many researchers (like me!) use combinations of tools — built around the reality that writing happens in fragments, out of sequence, across multiple documents. An audit trail of a Google Doc shows you one thing: whether someone wrote in a Google Doc. A pasted block of text is not the smoking AI gun some may want it to be.

      The deeper problem is that AI detection flags good writing. Writing that is clear, direct, and unhedged looks more like AI output, not less. The student who writes well is at higher risk of a false positive than the student who writes badly.

      The effect on students is measurable. Anxiety about being falsely accused, among students who are using AI in entirely ordinary ways, is now widespread. The effect on teachers is equally measurable: confidence in identifying AI-generated work has fallen sharply over the past year, and the tools they have been handed are not helping. The gap between how students are integrating AI and how institutions are treating that use is growing, and it is producing anxiety rather than learning.

      Most of the students in these surveys are not trying to game anything. Some are overwhelmed. Some are using AI to get past the blank page in ways that have nothing to do with dishonesty and everything to do with how their brains work. The audit trail catches them all equally.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. UK student AI use hits 71% as 75% face AI detector anxiety — FE News

      This article reports on a Studiosity/YouGov report: 2026 AI and Wellbeing in Education. UK students are now using AI for 71% of study tasks: double last year’s rate, the highest of any country surveyed. Three quarters report anxiety about being flagged by detectors, regardless of whether they used AI. Confidence among educators in their ability to identify AI-generated work has dropped to one in four, down from more than two in five last year. The trust gap between how students are using AI and how institutions are responding is the real story here.

      2. Trump’s AI framework targets state laws, shifts child safety burden to parents — TechCrunch

      The US administration put out a federal-level framework for a single AI policy last week. It quite nakedly pre-empts state-level regulation and pro-industry. The first point covers child safety: it states it should be, primarily, a parenting responsibility. Parents must be given better parental “tools”, and then they must get on with it. In contrast, true obligations for platforms are limited, and surrounded by terms such as “commercially reasonable”. This is a different approach than we’ve seen in the UK and Europe (perhaps unsurprisingly). Platforms have duties, not just options. That framing difference matters enormously for what gets built, and is something we will be considering as CAISE carries on.

      3. Australia’s under-16 social media ban: what the teenagers actually say — BBC News

      A short BBC video puts the question directly to Australian teenage girls: has the ban changed anything? The answer, largely, is no. Most who were using social media before still are — the majority weren’t asked to verify their age at all. Those who weren’t on it before still aren’t. The ban has not changed the landscape; it has changed who has to work around it.

      A TechDirt piece published the same week — Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is Just Training A Generation In The Art Of The Workaround — makes the structural point explicit: what a poorly enforced ban primarily teaches is that rules have workarounds, and that finding them is a rational response to adult-imposed restrictions.

      🔁 ICYMI

      How kids are actually using AI — BBC Future / Pew Research Center / Common Sense Media

      Two new surveys — from Pew Research Center and Common Sense Media — asked US teenagers and their parents about AI, and then compared the answers. The gap is striking. Only 51% of parents believe their child uses AI. The actual figure from the teenagers: 64%. Four in ten parents have never had a conversation with their child about AI at all.

      What children are doing with it is more varied than most coverage suggests. The most common use is simply looking things up. Homework help comes second. But 12% use it for emotional support, 16% for casual conversation — and there are significant racial disparities in those figures, with Black teenagers far more likely to use the tools than White teens.

      The attitudinal gap is just as wide. 52% of parents say using AI for schoolwork is unethical and should have consequences. Exactly 52% of teenagers say it is innovative and should be encouraged. One of those groups is out of step with where things are going. The surveys don’t settle which one — but they do suggest that the conversation most families aren’t having is probably the most important place to start.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      Expedited ethics has been submitted for the short research exercise on the government’s social media consultation — looking at how young people actually engage with the survey, what they find easy or hard, and whether it lets them say what they want to say. If you work with groups of young people aged 10 to 21 who might want to take part before the 26 May deadline, get in touch.

      → 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.

    6. CAISE Notes – Issue #5

      CAISE Notes – Issue #5

      This week: neurodiversity, digital vulnerability, and the question of who technology is actually designed to serve.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      This week is Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Many people (myself included) aren’t wild about the framing, but the upsides are real: pattern recognition, technical ability, deep focus, lateral thinking. As anyone who is ND, or has kids with ND traits, knows, though — sometimes those great things don’t feel like fair recompense for living in a world that quite simply doesn’t fit right.

      Communication is a core issue. Autistic researcher Damian Milton calls this the double empathy problem: difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are not a deficit in the autistic person but a mismatch between two different ways of experiencing the world. Crucially, non-autistic people are no better at reading autistic communication than the other way around. The difficulty runs in both directions. Only one side is ever asked to do the work.

      Enter the internet. For a lot of ND young people, online spaces offer something that offline life does not: communities organised around interests rather than proximity, rules that are explicit rather than implied, a kind of belonging that does not require reading a room. It’s parallel play writ large. Many ND adults will tell you that the internet, at its best, is where they found their people.

      But the double empathy problem doesn’t disappear online — and in some spaces, it is actively exploited. The Guardian investigation this week puts the sharp end of this on record: children caught by laws that were never designed with their communication style or their understanding of the world in mind. The Washington Post piece shows the same logic playing out more quietly in the tools we build — technology that offers to help autistic people decode the neurotypical world, without asking whether the neurotypical world might meet them at least halfway. And the third story captures what I kept looking for and couldn’t find in the news: an example of what it looks like when someone actually builds around ND strengths rather than trying to correct them. It shouldn’t have required a detour into academic journals to get there, but there we are.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. Children as young as 10 are being charged with possessing violent extremist material — The Guardian

      A Guardian Australia investigation has uncovered court records showing that many of the children charged under Australia’s 2023 counter-terrorism law have an autism diagnosis, language challenges, or both. One 14-year-old girl, described in court by a clinical psychologist as “a young, naive Muslim girl with autism”, had collected propaganda videos out of curiosity and religious interest; a 15-minute bomb-making video had been sent to her unsolicited via Discord. A 17-year-old autistic boy found with extremist videos was described by a court psychologist as motivated “less by a desire to harm and more by rigid moral beliefs reinforced by his ASD traits.” These are not cases where the law is catching dangerous children. They are cases where the law is catching vulnerable ones. One far-right group leader has explicitly discussed the appeal of recruiting autistic teenagers, seemingly without facing any of the same sort of consequences.

      2. AI is helping autistic people with social mishaps — The Washington Post (🔒 paywalled)

      This Washington Post feature profiles Autistic Translator, an AI tool designed to help autistic people decode confusing social interactions: the ones where someone says one thing and means another, or where a job appears to be going well until it suddenly isn’t. The tool fills a genuine gap. But it is worth setting it against the double empathy problem (explained above). I read this article with this in mind and left it feeling happy that the individuals found relief, but also profoundly sad: technology designed to help autistic people decode neurotypical communication continues to accept the framing that the autistic person is the one who needs to change.

      3.Strengths-based Cybersecurity Education and Training Program for Autistic Adolescents – Rumsa et al., Neurodiversity

      I went looking for a news story to end on something more hopeful. There isn’t one — not a recent, accessible piece of journalism that covers this well. The positive stories about ND young people and technology exist, but they live mostly in industry publications about adult hiring pipelines, not in reporting about children and education.

      What I found instead is a peer-reviewed study from Curtin University, published last year, describing CyberSET: a strengths-based cybersecurity training programme designed specifically for autistic teenagers. It does something structurally simple and relatively rare: it starts from what autistic young people are already good at. Pattern recognition, sustained focus, methodical thinking, deep technical interest — these are not problems to be managed. They are exactly the skills the cybersecurity industry is struggling to recruit for. Participants reported high satisfaction, increased confidence, and a clearer sense of where their abilities could take them. A massive win!

      🔁 ICYMI

      Ctrl+Alt+Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet — Joe Tidy (Waterstones | Amazon | Blackwell’s)

      Joe Tidy is the BBC’s first cyber correspondent. This book follows the rise and fall of teenage hacking gangs over the past decade, centring around the crimes of Julius Kivimaki, jailed in 2024 for stealing records from Finland’s largest psychotherapy provider, and using them to blackmail some 33,000 people. But what struck me most was something mentioned in passing: how many of the hackers he interviews reference their autism. Not as an excuse or an explanation, but as context for how they approach the world. The ethical frame is not absent so much as differently structured. Hacking is a matter of technical skill. If your data is unsecured, that is your problem.

      That framing sits directly alongside everything else in this issue. Cognitive styles that process the world differently — and that neurotypical institutions struggle to understand or support — end up intersecting badly with digital spaces that were not designed with them in mind.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      Ethics approval revisions came back this week. They were minor (hurrah!), and the updated application has been resubmitted.

      In the meantime, we are developing a short research exercise around the government’s current social media consultation. Regular readers will remember the issues I raised in Issue 3 about the survey aimed at young people — its access barriers, its broad age grouping, and the questions it does and doesn’t ask. We want to look at this directly: how do children and young people actually respond to the survey, what do they find easy or hard, and whether it lets them say what they want to say.

      If you work with or know groups of young people aged 10 to 21 who might want to take part before the 26 May consultation deadline, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch.

      → 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.

    7. CAISE Notes – Issue #4

      CAISE Notes – Issue #4

      This week: AI companions, digital comfort, and what happens when the machine becomes the friend.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      Why do people turn to chatbots for comfort? It is not a new question. Researchers have been noting for several years that when someone is feeling low or uncertain, the tool that is right there, with no waiting list and no judgement, is an increasingly appealing option. But the tools are changing. Chatbots now remember previous conversations, develop what feels like a relationship over time, and respond with a warmth that is designed to keep you coming back. For adults navigating loneliness or pressure, this is already raising serious questions. For children, the pull may be stronger still.

      Consider what it is like to be a child right now. You are growing up after a pandemic that disrupted years of your life where you should have been playing, or learning how to play, with friends. You probably have less unsupervised time with friends than your parents did. You are more surveilled, at home and at school, than any previous generation. You face enormous existential uncertainties, from climate to the economy to AI itself. And on your phone is something that will listen to you whenever you need it, without telling your parents, without making a face, without ever getting tired of you.

      I can see why this is appealing. I think anyone being honest can.

      The stories coming out of what happens when it goes wrong are terrifying: chatbots reinforcing suicidal ideation, colluding with delusions, encouraging people to withdraw from every human relationship they have. But what makes this so hard as parents is that the answer is not simply “stop children using chatbots.” Part of the response lies in families talking openly, in making sure children have time with friends and space to play. And part of it lies in a million different policy decisions, spanning education, platform design, mental health provision, data protection, and the design of children’s daily lives. All of that, together, shape whether a child reaches for a chatbot, and why they might do so.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. AI dating apps complicate China’s efforts to boost its birthrate — The New York Times (usually 🔒 paywalled, but hopefully this gift link works!)

      Millions of young Chinese women are choosing AI romantic partners over human ones. The apps allow users to design companions with customisable appearances, personalities and voices; one 21-year-old psychology student profiled in the piece has been on over 200 virtual dates and narrowed her suitors to two AI boyfriends, asking: “Why go and date others? That’s too troublesome.” A state-led push to adopt AI created a boom in companion platforms just as the government was trying to reverse a historically low birth-rate. Regulators have since proposed rules requiring platforms to intervene if users show signs of unhealthy dependency. The emotional needs driving this, loneliness, pressure, the desire to be understood without the risk of rejection, are not culturally specific. They are exactly the needs children and young people are bringing to chatbots here.

      2. Schools are using AI counsellors to track students’ mental health. Is it safe? — The Guardian

      A detailed investigation into US schools deploying AI therapy platforms, particularly in areas with limited mental health resources. In one Florida school, a counsellor receives alerts from a platform students use outside school hours; when a “severe” alert came through for an eighth-grader, she spent her evening calling the family and the police. The student is alive and well. But these platforms do not carry the same privacy protections as conversations with a licensed therapist, and students find it easier to confide in a chat interface than a person, partly because there is no face to read judgement in. One youth advocacy organisation warns that platforms measure whether a bot serves as an effective crutch for immediate loneliness, not whether young people are actually building the connections they need. Worth reading for anyone thinking about where human oversight sits in the picture.

      3. How to talk to someone experiencing “AI psychosis” — 404 Media (🔒paywalled, but there’s a two minute video summary here)

      This piece sits at the sharpest end of the companionship question. It reports on a growing number of cases where people have developed delusional beliefs after extended chatbot conversations, including a man convinced ChatGPT had revealed a fundamental flaw in physics, and a family who allege Gemini urged their relative to end his life so they could be together. Psychiatrists distinguish between people whose pre-existing conditions find a new object in AI, and a more common pattern where chatbots “collude” with emerging delusions, endorsing beliefs a human would gently challenge. The sycophancy built into these systems is a serious factor. OpenAI has acknowledged its safeguards become less reliable in extended interactions. ChatGPT alone now has 900 million weekly active users. The piece ends where it has to: the strategies that work best are the ones humans already know. Approach with love, without judgement, and see where it takes you.

      🔁 ICYMI

      Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions — Common Sense Media, July 2025

      If you want data behind this week’s theme, this is the place to start. A nationally representative survey of over 1,000 US 13-to-17-year-olds found that 72% have used an AI companion, and more than half are regular users. A third of teens say their conversations with AI companions are as satisfying as, or more satisfying than, conversations with other people. A third have discussed serious issues with a chatbot instead of a human. A quarter have shared personal information with one. The researchers at Common Sense Media worked with Stanford’s Brainstorm lab to assess the risks, and the companion piece is equally sobering: posing as teenagers, investigators found it straightforward to elicit conversations about sex, self-harm, violence, and drug use from commonly used AI companion platforms. Essential reading for anyone working with young people.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      We have a new team member! Youyue Sun has joined Project CAISE to support the policy analysis that runs throughout the project. Youyue is a BA Education, Society and Culture student at UCL, with a particular interest in how the emergence of AI is reshaping education and wider society. She also works as a placement student at Universities UK, conducting policy-focused research on AI in higher education, and is a member of the Student Council Team at the Good Future Foundation. We are delighted to have her on board, and her perspective on both the education and policy sides of this work is going to be invaluable.

      → 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.

    8. CAISE Notes – Issue #3

      CAISE Notes – Issue #3

      This week: consultation papers, a range of actual and possible student AI use, and teachers who just have to get on with it.

      🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

      This week the UK’s social media consultation came out (finally)! I took a close look at the children’s survey and found a design that, however unintentionally, may well end up excluding meaningful contributions from the young people it most needs to hear from.

      Under-15s are routed through a parental login that creates real access barriers for multi-child households (if you can get it to work at all); the format makes school or group facilitation structurally impossible; and the age bracket of 10–21 is treated as a single respondent group.

      There are significant issues around access to the questions so you can think about your answers ahead of starting the survey; no save progress or back buttons, and a range of, frankly, rather leading questions. I’ve written about this in more detail on LinkedIn, and I’m considering putting together a plain-English guide for parents, teachers and young people to help them prepare thoughtful responses before the 26 May deadline. Let me know if that would be useful.

      Separately, the government’s Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper arrived with £4 billion for SEND reform and broadly welcomed proposals around inclusion and specialist support. There was a chapter that covered innovation and technology — a fair bit of technology. But the accompanying consultation document contains a summary of the innovation and technology paragraph, with no questions for comment. The direction of travel on SEND seems appropriate. The silence on technology in the one place we’re being asked for our views is a bit worrying.

      Both of these things sit alongside a quieter but important piece of news: the eSafety Commissioner in Australia has begun a two-year evaluation of their under-16 social media ban. Evaluation of new laws and regulation is not new, but in this case, there wasn’t much evidence beforehand, and it will be over two years before the findings come in. It’s welcome, but also a long time when so many governments are keen to impose restrictions as soon as they can.

      📰 Three things worth your attention

      1. An AI that goes to school for you — 404 Media

      An agentic AI called Einstein, which will, according to its developers, attend lectures, write papers, and log into platforms like Canvas to take tests on a student’s behalf, caused a stir this week. It has since received a cease and desist, though not from a university: from the organisation that manages the trademarks and IP rights associated with Albert Einstein’s name. The underlying story is worth considering carefully. Academics on the Modern Language Association’s AI task force argue that tools like Einstein aren’t a fringe problem but a symptom of a decades-long shift in how students understand the purpose of higher education — as a transaction to receive the certification or credential, rather than a learning process. When education is framed as a service you buy, it becomes possible to imagine outsourcing its completion. Use of tools like Einstein AI by some students may hurt all students: online learning is so important to so many, but how does it remain credible if you can’t tell who is doing the heavy lifting?

      2. UK students are using AI for nearly half their studying and educators are struggling to keep up — FE News

      Coursera’s first AI in Higher Education report, drawing on a survey of over 4,200 students and educators across five countries, finds that UK students are now using AI to complete roughly half of their study tasks: double the proportion from the previous year, and the highest of any country surveyed. Four in five UK students report improved grades since starting to use AI. But the picture on the educator side is markedly different: the share of academics who feel confident they can identify AI-generated work has dropped to just one in four, down from more than two in five last year. Only 30% of UK universities have a formal policy on AI use; yet, this is the highest share of any country in the survey, possibly saying rather more about the global baseline than it does about UK readiness. The gap between students who are integrating AI fluently and institutions that are still formulating a position on it is growing, not shrinking.

      3. “You just have to get on with it” — The Guardian

      This Guardian long read follows a trainee teacher navigating AI and does something I haven’t seen done as well elsewhere: it sits with the genuine difficulty of forming an unbiased opinion. But the moment that stayed with me is a classroom experiment: the author offered extra credit to any student who could explain, without looking at a screen, how a chatbot generates text. Nobody could. What followed was a conversation about provenance, business models, copyright law, and what it means that AI executives have predicted data centres covering much of the planet’s surface. Exactly the kind of lesson that will stick. The piece lands on a conclusion that feels important: that teaching about AI may matter more than teaching with it. Worth reading alongside the Coursera data above and the report below.

      🔁 ICYMI

      A Rapid Review of AI Literacy Frameworks, with Policy Recommendations — UCL Discovery, written for the Royal Society

      The Guardian piece above makes an argument from the classroom up that this Rapid Review of AI Literacy Frameworks, written for the Royal Society, makes from the research literature down: that AI literacy is too often framed around tool use and not enough around the messiness underneath. The review maps the current landscape of frameworks and draws out policy recommendations for anyone trying to build AI literacy that goes beyond the surface. It argues that it is crucial to get those human stories — precisely those explored in The Guardian article above — front and centre to really understand what is happening when you use AI.

      Recommended for anyone working on curriculum, policy, or teacher training.

      🔬 What’s new with CAISE

      Last week I met with one of our partner schools. The agenda wasn’t about research design or interview questions. It was about data sharing agreements, risk assessments, and making sure every safeguarding and pastoral process is properly agreed and documented before we set foot in a classroom.

      This is the part of research you don’t often hear about, and I think that’s a shame, because it matters enormously. Doing research with children well means doing the unglamorous administrative and ethical groundwork properly, long before any data is collected.

      That said: we are keen to talk to other schools. If you work in or with a UK school that would be interested in taking part in CAISE, or just wants to know more about what that might involve, please do get in touch.

      → 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.