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Are kids prepared to face AI?

AI sounds cool to everyone, as it performs tasks and actions that no one thought the computer would do one day, even better than humans. Kids with their curious instincts and by the virtue of nature are more inclined towards the digital world. However, little understanding they have of how AI works, what makes an AI, and the difference between the physical and the digital world.

We have seen how AI has taken over our daily lives in the last few years. Name a day-to-day digital task that AI can't do. I think there is none. However, as we know, AI-based tools and products are dependent on the data. These tools are trained on the relevant datasets of the task that they are expected to do. Such as an age progression application is dependent on datasets of faces. A model is trained on the dataset. The more samples in the training dataset, the better the application prediction. Most of the time this data comes from the internet.

Kids and teenagers tend to spend much of their time online, be it on social media or online chatrooms. Although there are certain restrictions on protecting the interests of users online, they are not sufficient at all. Proving the age of 18 or above is just a click! Content restrictions on social media platforms are biased and are easily bypassed. Children post their photographs, videos, and thoughts on social media thinking it is a perfect place where nothing can go wrong. In recent times there has been a craze to become a vlogger, and how can we expect kids to miss the bandwagon? A large number of kid vloggers are coming up every day, sharing almost every activity of theirs on the internet, sharing details of their home, their neighborhood, their parents, their habits, and everything else that you can guess, some of them are not even 10.

All these exposed information puts everyone at risk from the child to their parents. Entities building AI products are always in active mode for data collection, to profile the users. So are the cyber criminals, and cyberstalkers. They collect the data, do analysis on the collected data, and use it for their purpose such as identity theft, cyber arrest, manipulating kids, and most dangerous; crimes involving kids such as forcing the kids to be involved in child pornography that may haunt them for the rest of their lives. So what's the solution? Snatch the smartphone from kids? Try it, you will fail!!! Access to technology is a 21st-century child's birthright, monitoring the technology is the duty of 21st-century adult.

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