We want trustful AI – the way this can work is by keeping us safe, by securing our data and asking our permission
Member of Children’s Parliament, Stirling
Over the last three years (2022-2025), we have been working with our partners at the Scottish AI Alliance (SAIA) and The Alan Turing Institute (ATI) to learn about the impacts of AI on children and their rights through the project Exploring Children’s Rights and AI. Working with more than 140 children from across Scotland, we explored how they interact with AI, what they think the possibilities and risks are for the use of AI in Scotland, and how they can become meaningfully involved in AI development and policy.
As this project nears its end, we are excited to be launching a learning resource for adults working with AI. This short course provides an introduction to children’s human rights and helps professionals to explore why children’s rights are relevant when they are making decisions about AI development, regulation and use. The resource includes reflective exercises to help consider changes that adults can make to ensure children’s rights are upheld in their work and workplaces.
Taking a child rights approach, we asked Members of Children’s Parliament to think about what needs to happen for AI to play a role in keeping all children happy, healthy, and safe. To try to capture as broad a range of views as possible and to reflect the diversity of experiences of children in Scotland, we worked with classes ranging from P4 to P7 in four schools in different locations across Scotland: Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh, and Shetland.
Members of Children’s Parliament told us that they want to be asked for permission by companies that use children’s data to train AI systems. Children also wanted to see clear rules about how much and what data companies are allowed to gather about children.
We learned that children feel strongly about the need for their rights and views to be taken into account by adults when making decisions about AI development, legislation and use. They felt it was important that adult decision-makers understood children’s human rights and act on them. That’s why we created this resource: to share the issues that children raised in relation to AI and to invite adult professionals to reflect on the use of AI and how it may impact children’s lives.
The eLearning modules highlight the importance of using a children’s rights lens in AI development – an area where children’s views and experiences have not often been taken into account. In the modules, we draw on our experience and practice in the field of children’s rights, alongside children’s own thoughts and views on AI and its impact on their lives. These are explored through four key themes that children identified as especially relevant when discussing children’s rights and AI:
For a quick glimpse of what that looks like, click here to read the children’s calls to action.
The resource also offers insights and prompts to help you reflect on your role in supporting children’s rights, and how informed decision-making around AI development and use can better take these rights into account. As AI technologies play an ever-greater role in our lives, it is vital for the safety and happiness of children – now and in the future – that we make these decisions with children’s best interests at heart.
We hope the resource will achieve its purpose of raising awareness about children’s human rights and the incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in Scotland. We also hope it will provide a platform for sharing children’s voices—highlighting what matters to them when it comes to AI, and how adults can ensure that new technologies support children’s safety and wellbeing.
More about the children’s exploration of AI here: childrensparliament.org.uk/exploring-childrens-rights-and-ai
