There was a time when if you weren’t on social media, in particular Facebook, some would think you were a psychopath. Or at the very least “suspicious.”
Now, researchers find that the people who deactivate their Facebook accounts for even a month are happier than those of us on the platform.
I was an early user of many social media platforms (MySpace, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and now Bluesky and Threads). While I cherish the relationships I built on some of those platforms, if I could do it again, I don’t think I would have joined half of them.
As violent imagery and child exploitation flourish online, governments around the world have expressed their frustrations with the lack of regulation on social media companies. These platforms wield outsized influence on modern society, and misinformation and disinformation threaten democracies across the globe.
I was thinking about this while watching the new TVO original documentary, Dangerous Games. In it, the metaverse (and specifically gaming platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft) is portrayed as an online world where kids can find community and belonging — but can also become radicalized or preyed on by adults pretending to be children.
This is a sadly familiar story in online spaces, and we were warned. In a 2010 conversation, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton asked Steve Jobs if his kids used an iPad. Jobs responded, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bilton shared that anecdote in a 2014 article, for which he spoke with other tech CEOs who limited screen time for their children. I think about Bilton’s conclusion often: “these tech CEOs seem to know something that the rest of us don’t.”
Today, we’re at risk of making the same mistakes with artificial intelligence, which has the potential to be much more disruptive. Instead of charging ahead, we should implement the lessons learned from social media and platforms such as Roblox. We need to take pause, especially when it comes to children.
A few months ago, I spoke to a group of high school students whose social media images had been manipulated by an AI tool into explicit deepfakes. These non-consensual images were allegedly created by a classmate. When the girls went to the police to report what happened, they were told there was nothing the police could do. While Canada’s Criminal Code has robust laws for revenge porn, deepfake images are not recognized. (On the campaign trail, Mark Carney pledged that, if elected, the Liberals would criminalize “the producing and distributing of non-consensual sexual deepfakes.”)
This is just one of many ways in which AI tools can cause irreparable harm to children. Last week, a judge in the U.S. allowed a lawsuit to move forward that alleges that an AI chatbot encouraged a 14-year-old to die by suicide. The boy’s mother says that the chatbot, which was in the likeness of a character from the HBO show Game of Thrones, had encouraged her son to die by suicide, after creating a relationship that was “romantic and sexual in nature”.
We can’t avoid AI. It’s incorporated into the search engine I used to research this article and embedded in the software I used to write this column. It’s used in medicine and in schools, and ChatGPT has become a trusted assistant in many households. But that doesn’t mean we need to let it run rampant. Meta claims that AI friends could be the solution to loneliness. Journalists like me are worried that AI might replace us (but after a Chicago newspaper published a reading list written by AI replete with books that don’t exist… maybe journalists have a bit more time.)
In a recent TED Talk, Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian researcher who has been called a “godfather” of AI, argues that “a sandwich has more regulation than AI.”
Surely, we need to become proactive in our approach to AI regulation.
But what to do as a parent or guardian? Do you take all the screens away and bar your children from ever going onto the internet? Hard to do, especially as technology is increasingly woven into education systems.
Quintin Smith, an expert quoted in Dangerous Games, says the answer isn’t to ban kids from using online platforms. These platforms are how kids socialize. He says parents shouldn’t let their children online until they understand how these platforms work: “If our stoves and hairdryers come with warnings, then, how is it possible that our software doesn’t?”
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But perhaps before we push it into every aspect of our lives and the lives of our children, we practice some caution. At the very least, we listen to the words of Yoshua Bengio in his TED Talk, when discussing the potential of an AI-fueled extinction event. “We’re not ready. We still don’t have the scientific answers, nor the societal guardrails. We’re playing with fire.”