Generative AI and children’s digital futures: New research challenges

Abstract

From WALL·E (Stanton, Citation2008) to The Wild Robot (Sanders, Citation2024), children’s popular culture is filled with sympathetic, lovable, heroic artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic characters who make passionate and ethical choices about their own existence and help others. The AIs of contemporary cinema and television are often excellent role models. Indeed, popular culture has been one of the main ways that AI have entered mainstream imaginaries for more than half a century (Leaver, Citation2012).

Yet even in popular culture, AI tend to be normative, and in most cases, coded white (Cave & Dihal, Citation2020). In feature films the creators of AI are similarly white male scientists the vast majority of the time (Cave et al., Citation2023). With the public launch of ChatGPT and other Generative AI (GenAI) tools in late 2022, AI emerged from popular culture into everyday life with surprising speed for many people, young and old. Yet the GenAI tools that have emerged bear little resemblance to the AIs of popular culture. Instead, they emerge from the same contexts and cultures which have characterised big tech for two decades, driven by commercial imperatives and extractive logics (Crawford, Citation2021). With GenAI being integrated into a vast array of tools and platforms – from videogames and creative software to educational platforms and almost all social media – the rapid appearance and increasing impact of AI on children and young people demands urgent attention from researchers across a broad range of fields.