Is there no choice but to embrace AI?

Hello, welcome to our podcast Raising Generation AI with me, Holly Green.

And me, Fiona Morgan.

How are you?

I’m fine, thanks. How was your Easter?

It was lovely. We went to France for the week and we had glorious weather, which was really, really nice, especially because it’s been a bit grotty here in the UK. But I did have a bit of a parenting low.

I thought you’d enjoy this. We were staying in a house out there and on one of the first days, this massive hornet flew into the house. It was huge.

It was the biggest hornet I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a beast of a thing. We’d been really careful, but I’d opened the door and it had flown in over my head.

The kids went crazy. They barricaded themselves in the bedroom. A husband had to catch this thing and get it out the house, which he did fine.

But then the kids won’t come out of the room because they’re now terrified that more hornets are going to come into the house. I’m using every tool in the parenting book to persuade them that it’s absolutely fine.

The chance of another hornet coming into the house is minute. I’ve never had a massive hornet in the house before. It’s not going to happen again and they’re not coming out of the room.

So I’m trying to think of a way to persuade them that it’s fine. It’s not going to happen again. And I’m thinking of a phrase like, you know, I’ll eat my hat if it happens again.

But I tried to make it more appropriate for children. What I ended up saying was, if another hornet comes into the house, you can have any treat you want, which I instantly requested.

Because while it got them both out of the room, they then started questioning me about what food hornets like to eat.

The rest of the week became me trying to keep hornets out of the house, and them doing everything they could to get hornets into the house.

So they’re leaving doors ajar, they’re leaving windows ajar, they’re leaving little piles of fruit around the place.

And this culminated on the last day, I walked into their room and there are glasses of squash, I’ve got biscuits smothered in nutella and jam, and I brought the sign along that they’ve made for the wall. Hornet party. That’s what it’s called.

Anyone that can’t understand a five-year-old phonetic writing, it’s hornet party, decorated with a few lovely pictures of hornets to encourage them into the room.

So luckily for me, they didn’t manage to get a hornet into the room, but the problem is I didn’t put any bounds on this, so now they think that at any point in their childhood a hornet makes it into the room, they get this treat.

And also their definition of a treat is quite different to mine. So in my head, I was thinking, maybe stay up late and watch a film. They’re thinking trip to Disney.

So I’ve got to be trying now to prevent any hornet ever making its way into any house that we’re in for the next 15 years, and we should be good. You know when you say something and as soon as you hear the words, you know how many treat you want?

No, Holly, that was a fairly poor bit of parenting. So yeah, that was the highlight of the kids week at any rate.

So we are here for our very first proper podcast. Our first question then is, do we have no choice but to embrace AI?

There’s a wide range of answers there because you’ve got everything from using AI to do absolutely everything for you and using it unquestioningly and fully embracing it. Or on the other side, you, well, I don’t know how you would avoid it entirely.

You’d probably have to go and live off in the Amazon or somewhere, but completely being very anti-AI, having nothing to do with it and doing everything you can to completely not make it part of your life.

What do you think? Do you use AI? Do you feel like you embrace it?

Do you feel like your kids are using it, your friends?

So I suspect I am using AI more than I know I am, in the sense that I think it’s probably embedded in more things than I perhaps appreciate.

I know I’m using it in things like Alexa and Siri, and I know I have used ChatGPT for some things, definitely, but not that many things. I tend to use it in a superficial way here and there.

More as a tool of curiosity, I would say really, than anything, I’m not using it for work or I’m not using it for anything particularly important, I wouldn’t say, but I’m probably, as I say, using it more than I perhaps appreciate that I am.

I mean, my kids are still pretty young. I don’t think they’re really using it or I’d like to think they’re not really using it. But again, maybe it’s built into things that they are using to an extent.

Have the kids ever, they are very young, but have the kids ever used the words ChatGPT or AI?

If they don’t seem to have any kind of awareness of it at the moment.

So I don’t think my two are really aware of it at all at the moment, but then they are very young.

And I think probably the older they get, the more difficult it gets to firstly, control what they’re accessing, but also even know what they’re accessing.

I suspect as kids get older, you sort of have less and less knowledge even of what they’re doing with AI. I think that will probably be something that maybe is one to ask our interviewee.

So yeah, I think this is a big question, but hopefully it will set us up quite well for future episodes where we can dig into some of these individual topics a little bit more deeply.

I agree. I think it’s a massive question. And I think it’s, you can flip it on its head and say, is it possible to avoid AI and shun the technology completely?

I don’t think that’s really that possible because it’s quite tricky to put a finger on what AI actually is. It’s been hiding in plain sight for more than a decade really.

We just tended to talk more about what it does rather than the fact that it’s AI. So take Google Maps, for example. You probably don’t consider Google Maps AI, but the tech is actually pattern spotting engine.

It is an algorithm behind the scenes that looks at thousands of cars to predict your arrival time, which is AI. And there are many types of AI that analyse data, detect patterns and then have an output. That’s kind of what AI is.

Some AI forecast things, like the weather. Others categorise things like your spam email detection. There’s anomaly detection, which is noticing when there’s a fraudulent transaction on your credit card.

Visual recognition, auto-tagging your photos on Facebook with the right people. Even things like Netflix suggesting your next film is an AI known as a recommendation engine.

So the AI people often think about is a generative AI and that’s your chat GPTs of this world. But this AI is just the same. It’s analysing a bunch of data, detecting patterns and offering an output.

And it’s just that the output is not numbers, it’s language, images, videos, audio. And as we discussed briefly last episode, that’s what’s brought it to the surface is because suddenly it’s not interacting with numbers and code anymore.

It’s interacting with language, images, video and audio, which people can understand without needing to learn anything. And most AI systems, as we call them, have a combination of all these different AI technologies.

And because all of the different types of AI, there’s not this 100% agreement on exactly what AI means. And so I think, I don’t think it’s possible to completely avoid it.

And I think, actually, as we move through the podcast, I think it’s really good for us to think about being more specific. So we will obviously say AI all the time and talk about AI.

But I think when we’re going to get the best conversations is when we dig into specifically, okay, what is it that people are worried about?

Because I’m pretty sure that no one’s worried about their kids using Google Maps to figure out how long it’s going to take to drive to football practice. But that is AI, right? And so saying, do we need to embrace it?

I don’t know how you can possibly avoid it, really. Maybe we can avoid some particularly difficult products that we don’t agree with. But I wonder if actually it’s not that easy to completely avoid AI if you use any form of technology.

What I would say is we have a great guest that we’re about to go and have a nice chat to. He is someone that can offer a bit of a guiding hand really on how to deal with this. So I don’t think there’s a way we can avoid embracing AI to an extent.

But I think we don’t have to do this alone. And there’s people that can help. And there’s ways we can do this better than just blindly kind of embracing it.

Do you know that’s all really interesting because you’re absolutely right.

Most of that stuff I had never even considered was AI. Google Maps, I use that all the time and hadn’t even given it a moment’s thought that could possibly be AI.

This is going to be so interesting, I think, going on so many of these topics in the coming podcasts. So yes, you got an interesting chat on for us today, who I’m really looking forward to speaking to.

Yes. So coming up next, we have the CEO of Childnet, Will Gardner.

I am super excited to introduce to you our first guest. Now, we’re not ones for keeping things small. We’re determined to find the very best people to help get the answers that we’re looking for.

So we’re starting out with the none other than Will Gardner OBE.

Named on the 2018 Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for his work in the field of children’s online safety, who better to talk to about managing the safety of our children than CEO of Childnet?

Childnet’s Safer Internet Day on 2026, the research found that 97% of children are using AI. Now that is quite a staggering statistic. Will Gardner, welcome to Raising Generation AI.

Thanks so much.

Great to be here.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This is great to have you on as our first guest. Now, I’m going to have to talk about this statistic, 97%.

That sounds huge, but give me a sense of, I mean, what ages are we talking? How are these children using it? What does that 97% represent?

So we did a survey of 8 to 17 year olds.

We’re out in the field in October last year. When we talk about AI here, we’re talking about AI in a broad sense.

So we’re including voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, as well as the more generative AI, ChatGPT will probably come to people’s mind when you say that. So it’s AI in its broadest sense.

And I think what’s really interesting, as well as the 97% data, I mean, that’s most children. In our work in primary schools and secondary schools, AI comes up a lot in our conversations.

And so I think when we’re talking about AI, we need to be thinking about younger children as well, because their interactions with the data started at age eight, but we could have gone younger, I’m sure younger children will know younger children are

interacting with this technology. So it is something that we need to be conscious of and aware of, but that is also a number which is increasing. So we had like over 50% of young people saying they’re using AI more than they were six months ago.

So as we see with the adult population, we see the same with the child population.

And in our focus groups with children when we are determining, well, what do we talk about for Safer Internet Day, which we organize every year, it happens in February. In our discussions, AI came up in all the conversation.

So this is a very live topic, just like it is with adults, is a very live topic for children too.

It’s incredible actually to hear a number that sat high. I was sort of coming on here to go, how ubiquitous is AI? But it sounds like it is already everywhere.

This is not a future problem. This is a now problem, isn’t it? We sort of need to get to grips with things right now because our children are accessing this technology as we speak.

Exactly, Holly.

That’s exactly the message that we want to get across for Safer Internet Day and beyond. And we might think about AI, we think about whether it’s Alexa or whether it’s ChatGPT, but it’s also beyond that.

You know, young people are engaging with AI in search and Gemini, coming up in search results, they see it in social media, in messaging apps, it’s appearing in gaming, in non-playable characters and others.

So AI is becoming, it is like you said, use the word ubiquitous. And we had one 10-year-old in our research saying, you know, I probably use AI, but I’m not sure if I’m using AI. And I think she captured it exactly right.

Do you think adults and parents have a good understanding of how their children are using it?

Or do you think children are using it in ways that we don’t really appreciate? Do you think there’s a big sort of gap there?

There will always be a gap in relation to technology use between parents and carers and children and young people, to some degree. Obviously, it depends on the age of the child you’re talking about.

But if I look back to some work that we’ve done previously, and I use social media as an example, we had a keynote speech by a 14-year-old boy.

His words, two sentences, he said, every generation’s experience of youth is different, and ours is framed by social media.

In just two sentences, he brilliantly described why, if we’re talking about technology and talking about safety of technology and regulation of technology, anything to do with technology, we need to be including young people’s voice in that, because

their experience of technology is not the same as our experience. With social media, it’s much more obvious. Our social media experience is not the same as each other’s, but for children, it’s different absolutely between that of adults.

I think it’s similar in the ways that young people are using engaging with AI. I think children, young people are often quite pioneering in their use of tech, and the conversation we’re going to have may go into these different areas.

But I think we’re seeing AI being used in some ways, which we might not have ordinarily have thought children would be using it in that way. Companionship is perhaps part of that conversation.

But also how AI can seep into social interactions when young people are wanting to interact with their peers, and they’re not sure what to say.

Maybe they might reach out to AI and get a sense check, and it’s probably being used in ways which parents might not imagine it.

He sounds very wise for a 14-year-old, doesn’t he?

But I think that’s what’s so hard about parenting nowadays, because you’re not having such a different experience to the one we grew up with, not just with AI, but as you say, with social media and so many other things.

And it does feel hard as a parent to try and navigate your way through this. And I think so often, children, because they’re growing up with this technology, they know more about it than us anyway, don’t they? It’s almost natural to them.

It’s just the world they’re growing up in, whereas to us, it’s about having to learn it all and get to grips with it.

I mean, do you have a sense of if children are worried about AI, they’re struggling with it, they’re coming across issues with it, who do they go, who do they look to, to find out more about it, to learn about it, to get advice?

I don’t know whether your research has given you a sense of that.

We did ask about that. If you were worried about something in relation to AI, who would you go and talk to? Parents and carers were by far the first port of call there.

Parents and carers play that role. In other research we’ve done about other areas of young people’s lives, that’s also true, whether it be about scams or bullying or other things.

Parents and carers are the people that young people would turn to first. And that tracks right from the ages of 8 through to the ages of 17. Friends becomes more important as, you know, through teenage years.

But parents are still number one. The point that you made, Holly, is something that we hear very often from parents. You think so quickly, how do I keep up?

My children should be teaching me about this technology. I think I say a couple of things there. One is that children want someone to go and talk to if there’s a problem.

Parents and carers are the people that we talk to. You need to be ready and receptive for that conversation to happen. At Childnet, we go out to schools and we talk to parents all the time.

One of the messages that we give to parents and carers is to be ready for that conversation to really encourage that conversation and when it does happen, to be curious and not furious because sometimes things can be quite shocking.

You might be quite taken aback by some of the things that young people might want to say, but it’s important that you don’t close off avenues of communication going forward and you just listen to what the young people have to say and then try and

find ways to work together to address whatever worries that is. I think that’s one important thing.

I think the other important thing is that the things that we’re worried about in relation to AI are very much the same things that young people are worried about in relation to AI.

I think there’s a real opportunity of, this isn’t about parents doing online safety to children. This is affecting all of us. What do we do?

What are the rules of the road in relation to making this technology fit into our family life and our broader, wider lives?

And we’ve got that opportunity of intergenerational exchange where children can be helping and advising parents as well as the other way around.

And are there places that parents can go if they’re sort of thinking, you know, I need to get more to grips with this, I need to learn more about it.

Are there some good resources in place that parents can access to get more advice and to get more of a handle on things?

There definitely are. And I think that’s the second message that we deliver at parent sessions is that you are not alone with this. There are organizations who have been thinking about this and working to support parents in that space.

And we are one of those organizations and we have a website at childnet.com. We’ve got a range of different resources. We’ve developed the Safer Internet Day, which you can find at saferinternetday.org.uk.

And within that, you can find quizzes, tips, activities, things to try and get the conversation started. That’s what we really want to make happen.

And that’s what we are focused for Safer Internet Day when it happened on the 10th of February this year, was to stimulate conversations because we know, and we’ve just done our evaluation of the day, of schools across the UK were engaged in

supporting Safer Internet Day. And we did a survey of schools afterwards to say, well, what impact did it have? What difference did it make?

And 60% of the teachers who responded to the survey said, talking about online safety and AI safety led to young people coming forward and talking about things that they were worried about.

So it led to kind of potential online safeguarding disclosures from young people to parents.

So it really just shows if the adult can say, we can talk about this, it makes it much more easy for a young person to come forward and say, great, I want to talk to you about this.

And that’s exactly the same for parents and carers as well as for teachers and educators.

I suppose that’s just a wider lesson for parenting, isn’t it? Keep those lines of communication open and try and work through these things together. There’s obviously a lot of negatives around AI.

Did young people have an overall negative view of AI or actually do they feel there’s a lot of positives to be found?

Yeah, I’ve been very positive about AI. I think in the main, you know, they see 80% see AI used in positive ways. I think a high 70% say that it’s made my life better.

You know, there are real recognitions of the value and the benefits that AI can bring. And I think people can see that, adults can see that, children can see that, and that’s reflected the same. There are absolutely concerns.

And some of the concerns we haven’t touched upon today, like include the issues around bias, around the results of AI. AI is fed off information that is out there in the public domain, and really reflects the society that we live in.

And any biases that we have in our society will absolutely get reflected back out through AI, unless it’s been modified to address those biases.

And I know that many of the companies are actively, been actively working to try and make sure that happens. But there are other concerns, like the environmental concerns around AI, which are really living, breathing concerns.

I’ve got five kids, and one of my children absolutely won’t touch AI because they’re so concerned about the environmental impact, the water requirements that AI has at the moment.

And I think young people are very, not just young people, but we associate young people’s passion with environmental issues very readily.

And I think hearing that voice in relation to this technology is really important because this technology can make things so much easier, but we always have to recognize what cost.

So do you actually use AI yourself or anything, Will?

I do sometimes use AI. I’m quite conscious about how I use it and what I use it for, but I do use it. I don’t proclaim to be an AI expert in that sense, but I can see the incredible power that it has and the benefits that it can bring.

So yes, I do use AI. And perhaps, like the 10-year-old girl said, as I mentioned earlier, perhaps consciously and unconsciously, I will use this technology.

Okay. So the whole point of the podcast then today, as a mum who was very worried about all this stuff, Will, do I have no choice but to embrace AI?

The way you could look at that question is like, is it a resigned acceptance of our fate of life with AI, which I think might become missing what we’re talking about.

I do think it has like incredible opportunities, and I think everybody needs to understand what those are, as well as understand what the risks are, because even if you’re not using it directly, it can still have an impact on your life.

So I think it’s important that we, if you don’t want to embrace it, it’s your choice, and there are reasons why people might not want to take up AI, but it is happening. It’s all around us, and we need to understand what it is.

Our research shows that young people are engaging with it, even from a very young age. And so it’s critical that we are having conversations with children at a young age about this technology.

It can do incredible things, but we need to be controlling our engagement with it. We are agents in our use of AI.

Thank you so, so much, Will. That was really insightful, and really appreciate everything that you’ve been able to share.

Can you just remind us one last time where we can find those resources so that people can go and have a little dig around and see what they can do?

Yes, I really encourage you to have a look at saferinternetday.org.uk, and that’s where you can find the wealth of resources around AI.

And there are educational resources we’ve developed for educators working with children aged three to seven, to eleven, eleven to fourteen, and fourteen to eighteen. And you don’t have to be an educator to use these resources.

And they’re just really good at stimulating conversations around this as a topic. And so for the younger age group, there’s a story and you can read it with a child and it has kind of conversation points that can be generated.

And really it’s to develop, to try and understand, well, what is AI? Recognize that it’s not a human. What’s it good for?

What’s it not so good for? And then it develops through the ages to understand about chat bots and companion AI and some of the risks as you get older.

And well, there’s a great activity for the 11 to 14 year olds where they outline a number of different risks of AI. And the young people have to write them into the order they think are the most serious and the least serious.

And that can be a really interesting way to draw out what your young person’s concerns are around this bits of technology and really can help inform you in your ability to support them in their use of AI, but also to help keep yourself safe whilst

Brilliant.

Thank you. And that’s saferinternetday.org.uk.

Exactly.

Well, thank you so much for joining us, Will. It’s been fascinating to chat to you today. Thank you so much for being our first guest.

I feel like we’ve got many more topics to cover in the coming weeks and months. And maybe we can have you back on again to dig into some of these topics a little bit deeper in the future. But yeah, thank you so much for joining us today.

It’s been brilliant.

It’s been brilliant. Thanks, Holly. Thanks, Fiona.

Well, he was great, wasn’t he?

How are you feeling about it now?

He was brilliant. I just feel now that there are even more topics to go into.

And one of them, I’m going to ask you now, as a parent who perhaps just doesn’t feel like they really have any grasp at all on AI and wants to understand more about it, where do we go? What do we do?

What’s the first step to see what the fuss is about?

I think people are probably using AI and they’re not really aware they’re using AI. But I also think everyone talks about ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is just one of these things. And there are loads of them.

There’s Claude and Gemini and stuff like that. But ChatGPT is a good place to start. It has a free tier.

So actually you can go make a profile, have a little chat with ChatGPT without having to spend any money. And I think as long as you consider the fact that you only put things in there that you wouldn’t mind being public.

So it’s a kind of be sensible with what you’re typing in to ChatGPT. And just have a little play. See what happens.

Ask it to explain a topic to you as if you’re five years old or give it a scenario and see what it thinks you should do and test it a little bit. Try and make it say something that it shouldn’t or give you terrible advice and have a bit of a play.

Because I think if you get hands on, then you’ll be in a better position. Like Will was saying, for when your kids do come and talk to you about it, if you’ve never used or touched this technology, then it can be quite difficult to advise.

I mean, have you had a go at all?

Yeah, I have a bit. So I found it quite useful asking it stuff that I already know about, just to see how it tackles that. And I found sometimes it does get it wrong and it gets it wrong in a very confident way, which is very eye-opening.

I have used it as well with, I must admit, with some of the questions the kids have come to me with, which I mean, even at five, it’s amazing the sort of questions children can ask sometimes. And I have gone to it to ask things.

But even as I’ve done it, I’ve had that little like flutter inside me of, does this make me a bad mother? So yeah, so no, I have, but I’ve sort of done it with that little, little question in my head, I think.

That’s an interesting topic. We could maybe set that up for next episode.

Okay, great. So next week, the episode is, does using ChatGPT make me a bad mom?

Yeah, absolutely. Let’s do it.

Okay, brilliant. And yeah, I think that’s it. Thank you so much to everyone for listening to our first proper episode.

If you enjoyed it, we’d love for you to leave us a review, as it will help some other parents find us.

And that’s kind of why we do it.

Come on, worry about it with us together. Thank you so much. We will see you next week.