Dear AoIR Friends and Colleagues, We're pleased to share the release of our ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child report "Children and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Australia: The Big Challenges", led by Suzanne Srdarov and myself. The world of AI is complicated and continually changing, with particular issues that impact on children and young people more than others. Our report highlights issues we believe AI companies, policy makers, educators and anyone responsible for thinking about AI and kids, should consider. In summary the 9 big challenges in terms of children and generative AI tools that we highlight are: ✨ Agentic Language - real-time interactions, especially via voice, make GenAI tools sounds like they are agents, aware of what they're saying (ie intelligent). They aren't. ✨ Bias - Indiscriminately harvesting data from many sources includes the biases inherent in these sources. Bias in often means bias back out again. ✨ Copyright and Ownership - while there are lots of legal questions about the training data, it's clear a lot of content was taken without permission or payment, which remains a big issue. ✨ Environmental Cost - the cost of a GenAI answer is significantly higher than other answers, including search. That adds up to a lot more power, water and other resources for these tools. In a world struggling with climate change, GenAI is making that struggle worse, not better. ✨ Indigenous Data Sovereignty - at present, Indigenous data is harvested indiscriminately, perpetuating the worst extractivist harms, and not giving Indigenous people a real say in how these tools are deployed. ✨ Interactive AI Agents & AI Companions - the design of GenAI tools makes them feel like actual people. Emotional ties and bonds can be built, especially by younger users. That can be dangerous. ✨ Privacy - these tools are all hungry for personal data in a range of ways, many of which are not made transparent to users. ✨ Ubiquitous AI - increasingly the question isn't where to find AI tools, but wide integration means it's hard to find online spaces where AI tools aren't now baked in. ✨ AI Literacies or Critical AI Literacies? - there's a vital difference between equipping young people to be AI tool users compared to having the literacy to evaluate the full costs and appropriateness (or not) of using these tools in the first place. The full report can be read and downloaded here: https://issuu.com/digitalchild/docs/children_and_generative_artificial_intel... More of the Centre's work on children and GenAI can be found here: https://digitalchild.org.au/artificialintelligence/ #artificialintelligence #GenAI #childrensrights Cheers, Tama -- Professor Tama Leaver (he/him) Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) http://aoir.org Professor of Internet Studies School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry (MCASI) Faculty of Humanities Curtin University GPO Box U1987 Perth WA Australia 6845 Ph: (+61 8) 9266 1258 Email: t.leaver@curtin.edu.au Web: www.tamaleaver.net