Age of AI: Why Parents Need New Skills to Protect their Children Online
We live in the information age. There is more information being thrown at us every day than any human can possibly process. Keeping up with the latest technological advancements while managing the crushing weight of daily responsibilities is difficult for anyone, let alone a parent. Yet, whether we like it or not, our children live in this brave new world and they will be impacted for life in ways most of us don’t yet appreciate. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the world in fundamental ways that most parents don’t understand. Mistakes you make as a parent today can have lasting, even everlasting consequences on your child. You owe it to yourself to get educated about the impact that modern digital technologies, AI included, are having on your child and the person they will become.
Limit the time your children spend online
I get it, as a parent, you are stressed out, overworked, and drained of energy from working hard and long hours. You get home, what you want to do is relax, instead, you have children that are full of energy and bouncing off the walls. All you want is some peace and quiet so that you can unwind and relax. The easiest and quickest way to do this today is to place your child in front of a screen. Almost magically, they go from being little terrors on two feet to sitting quietly and calmly while ingesting an age appropriate video.
Consider this, every video your children watch is teaching them something. Nothing is neutral. If you are going to feed your children videos, you need to be actively vetting them and monitoring what they watch. The world has an agenda for your kids and, if you are Christian, I promise you that the world’s agenda isn’t a Christian one.
Furthermore, when any of us watch content on a TV, tablet, or smartphone, it tricks our brain into becoming passive and more susceptible to suggestion.
Why the world is different today than in the past
With the advent of AI, major corporations can predict with a high degree of accuracy what we believe, what motivates us, our gender, ethnicity, our hopes, and dreams and a thousand other metrics. All of this takes place automatically and effortlessly without human intervention. In the past, data like this would have to be gathered by large armies of people who would then break things down and try to analyze them for patterns. Human beings have a much harder time recognizing patterns compared to computers.
Everything we do online is being tracked by someone. The main reason is because it is profitable for these companies to do so. Many services on the Internet are free to the average user. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a cost to using these services. It simply means that you don’t have to subscribe or pay any money up front to use services like social media or even many news sites. What too many fail to realize is that if you don’t pay for services that clearly cost the corporation to provide them, the corporations are going to need to find other ways of monetizing their services. This is where advertisers come in. The true customers of companies like Meta that run social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are the businesses that pay Meta to advertise on its platforms.
Weak Parental Controls
Since we are not the primary customers of large multi-national companies like Google, Apple, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft, these companies have little incentive to provide parents with effective parental controls. They are for-profit companies who have a duty to shareholders to maximize their investment and generate ever greater sums of profit for them. That profit push is all consuming and a powerful driver of their business activities.
Profit is more important to them than morals or anything else. The captains of these tech industries are only too happy to be using you and your kids for their own profit and advancement. Parental Controls are labor intensive to put into place and also cost them money to maintain. These same companies cannot directly monetize children because of laws and public pushback. Therefore, unless forced to implement controls by the government, they will resist implementing effective parental controls.
AI Just Made Things Worse
AI will bring us many good things. It can help me develop and research ideas better than anything else I’ve ever used. It helps me get better quality search results than were possible over the last few years of using the old Google site. Having said that, there are definitely some things that will get worse because of AI. One of those is our ability as parents to protect our children from the veritable deluge of filth online.
Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and other massive companies have so automated their systems that it is often difficult to speak to a real human being when needing support. One way they seek to maximize their profits is to automate as much of the public facing stuff that they can so that they don’t have to pay a human being to provide real support.
AI is very good at detecting patterns. As a person starts to go down a rabbit hole of information, the AI is very good at feeding them the next thing that will grab their attention. Big corporations have seized on this feature to keep the public addicted to their platforms and staying on them for as long as possible. Doing so allows them to sell more ads and therefore make more money.
For our kids, in practical terms, it means that if they get dark thoughts, struggle with anxiety, depression, or self-harm, the AI will pick up on these signals and start to nudge the child into the rabbit hole to potentially horrible results.
There are signs that the public is starting to push back against these harms from the popular Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. For now though, parents should not expect these corporations to do the policing for them. No one will care for or love your kids more than you do. These corporations are built to make a profit, not to babysit your children.
No One Cares for Your Kids Like You Do
Don’t expect these multinational companies or the government to do what is right by your kids. None of them love your kids like you do or have as much invested in their future happiness. Resist the urge to put your parenting on autopilot. Stay actively involved in your children’s life. Talk to them about the day to day choices they are making. Limit the access they have to harmful services like social media and Large Language Models like ChatGPT.
Yes, your kids will complain. They may even accuse you of being a terrible parent. Don’t believe it for a second. Our children are experts at manipulating us to do the things they want us to do. These online services are addictive. As your child grows into their teen years, the opinion of their peers gradually overtakes the opinion of you as a parent. The foundation laid in childhood will largely determine your success in adolescence.
Rules + Relationships = Obedience
To influence your children for the long-term, you must invest in your relationship with your child. They need to know that you love them and care for them for who they are. While it may often be the case that their interests and your interests are not aligned, work hard to find common ground with them wherever and whenever you can. It is this hard work of building this know, like, and trust that will serve you well as you seek to enforce boundaries that will protect your children from harm. If they don’t feel that you value them and love them, they will rebel against your rules.
Don’t take your relationship for granted. Yes, it means you’ll have to lay aside some of your hobbies and interests since each of us has limited time each day and week to invest in non-work related matters. The investment you make in their early years will pay dividends later in life as long as you maintain the effort and keep investing in them.
Whatever you do, don’t leave your children’s online future to chance. If you do, I promise you, you’ll live to regret it.
Joseph Duchesne is the creator of The Church AI Guy, a space where faith meets innovation while discussing the long-term impact of AI. A pastor, autodidact, and author of two books—The Last Crisis and Discover the One—he’s passionate about showing how Jesus-centered discipleship can thrive in a digital world. When he’s not experimenting with the latest tech, he’s reading theology, building church community, or spending time with his wife.