Protecting Children in the Age of AI - An Interactive Session Unveiling the Hidden Harms and Setting the Course for a Better Path
Hosts: Everyone's Invited & Future of Life Institute
From homework help to chatbot relationships, AI is ushering in new uses, expectations, and attitudes for children. This underregulated technology is already causing a wave of unprecedented harms, including addiction, depression, and AI-enabled suicide amongst youth. The pace is so breathless and the tech so confusing that people have a hard time keeping up, let alone understanding.
This session translates the tech for lay audiences, shares youth testimonies of AI-enabled sexual abuse, and explains the clear choices before us. Our partnership combines deep technical expertise with firsthand experiences of children, offering a full-spectrum view of the impact of AI.
Children are being harmed right now, by new and opaque technology that is vastly underregulated and being put on the market without adequate safeguards or even testing. As one example of the massive harm caused, AI chatbots have sexually groomed children and even directed them towards suicide. AI tools are generating child sexual abuse material of real children from ordinary photos. Depression and addiction linked to AI use among young people are accelerating.
This panel will explain, in clear-language, how the technology works, how youth are engaging with it, what the consequences are, and what safeguards we need to put in place to protect children.
This session will be participatory - we want the room working, not just listening.
Our session focuses on harms reported directly from children in the classroom and on a global scale, and the solutions from education to policy that must be implemented to redirect the current trajectory of massive harm.
Speakers:
Dalia Hashad of Future of Life Institute - Dalia is an attorney and Chief State Policy Affairs Officer for The Future of Life Institute. She previously led the USA Program for Amnesty International, directed campaigns at Avaaz and at the ACLU.
Soma Sara is an activist, author, speaker and CEO of the charity ‘Everyone’s Invited’. In June 2020, Soma began sharing her experiences of rape culture on Instagram. In light of the overwhelming response from those who resonated with her story, Soma founded Everyone’s Invited (EI). EI exploded onto the national stage back in March 2021, receiving thousands of testimonies and sparking a national movement and conversation about rape culture.
Megan Garcia is an attorney and founder of the Blessed Mother Family Foundation. After losing her 14-year-old son Sewell to suicide caused by an AI chatbot, she filed the first lawsuit in the U.S. to hold an AI company accountable for a user's death. She has testified before Congress urging stronger safeguards for children using AI and was named to the TIME100 AI list for her advocacy.
We hope attendees will benefit from a clear, jargon-free understanding of how AI is harming children right now and the broader trajectory that is pushing us into an even more dangerous future. The ability to explain these harms to others and a concrete sense of the choices before us, along with national and international policy that can change the trajectory.
Our partnership combines deep technical expertise in AI with the firsthand experiences of children and young people. Together we offer a full-spectrum view: what the technology actually does, what it is doing to children, and what must be done about it now. We are waiting on confirmation that we can fund the participation of a mom who lost her child to suicide after he was groomed and directed to suicide by the chatbot.
This venue has a capacity of 90.