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A new health advisory calls on developers of artificial intelligence and educators to do more to protect young people from manipulation and exploitation. NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: Systems using artificial intelligence are already pervasive in our increasingly digital lives.
MITCH PRINSTEIN: It's the part of your email application that finishes a sentence for you, or spell checks.
CHATTERJEE: Mitch Prinstein is chief of psychology at the American Psychological Association and one of the authors of the new report.
PRINSTEIN: It's embedded in social media, where it tells you what to watch and what friends to have and what order you should see your friends' posts.
CHATTERJEE: It's not that AI is all bad.
PRINSTEIN: It can really be a great way to help start a project, to brainstorm, to get some feedback.
CHATTERJEE: But teens and young adults' brains aren't fully developed, he says, making them especially vulnerable to the pitfalls of AI.
PRINSTEIN: We're seeing that kids are getting information from AI that they believe when it's not true. And they're developing relationships with bots on AI, and that's potentially interfering with their real-life, human relationships in ways that we got to be careful about.
CHATTERJEE: Prinstein says there are reports of kids being driven to violence and even suicidal behavior by bots, and AI is putting young people at a greater risk of harassment.
PRINSTEIN: You can use AI to generate text or images in ways that are incredibly inappropriate for kids. It can be used to promote cyberbullying.
CHATTERJEE: That's why the new advisory from the American Psychological Association recommends that AI tools should be designed to be developmentally appropriate for young people.
PRINSTEIN: Have we thought about the ways that kids' brains are developing, or their relationship skills are developing, to keep kids safe, especially if they're getting exposed to really inappropriate material or potentially predators?
CHATTERJEE: For example, building in periodic notifications into AI tools that remind young people they're interacting with a bot or suggestions encouraging them to seek out real human interactions. Prinstein says that educators can help protect youth from harms of AI. He says schools are just waking up to the harms of social media on kids' mental health.
PRINSTEIN: And we're a little bit playing catch-up. I think it's really important for us to remember that we have the power to change this now, before AI goes a little bit too far and we find ourselves playing catch-up again.
CHATTERJEE: Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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