I have recently completed work on a funded research project for the ESRC Digital Good Network, working with collegues from Plymouth University, University College London, Glasgow School of Art, and the RCA.
Our project was titled “Exploring children’s attitudes towards notions of the digital good through hybrid arts practice”. We secured funding in order to run a series of workshops with children aged between 8-13 to help understand their knowledge of, and attitudes towards the ethics and consequences of using of digital technology.
In particular we were interested in understanding children’s attitudes towards AI. Recent data from Ofcom indicates that children are almost twice as likely to have used AI tools than adults, yet most AI applications do not support children as valid users, requiring customers to be over 18 in order to use services such as ChatGPT or image generators.
Understanding how children respond to this technology, and their feelings towards the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ consequences of using AI, provided valuable knowledge of how emerging generations may engage with AI tools.
Our research workshops took place in five different school and educational settings, in London and Plymouth, UK. We used a range of creative data collection methods to help facilitate conversations with the children, including mask-making, drawing, and model making with clay and lego.
We found that children who particpated in the workshop had a broadly critical view of the AI technologies they had experienced. Although they understood some benefits of the tools, they were aware of practical limitations of the technology, as well as issues such as environmental impact, plagiarism, and surveillance. Many of them associated AI with glitching, mistakes, and even creepiness. These observations will be discussed further in upcoming publications. The final report of the project can be found here.