At just five years old, Mr Haojun See's son is already intimately familiar with using artificial intelligence (AI).The kindergartener uses generative-AI tools to whip up the outlines of various objects and creatures, including his favourite one at the moment – dinosaurs. He sends them to the printer before he sits down to colour them. The 40-year-old entrepreneur said: "If I control their AI usage, and one day I'm not there, something has the potential to go wrong. So I started teaching them (to use AI tools independently) as soon as the technology was introduced."He added that he has had many open conversations with his two sons about the possibilities, limitations and potential harms of AI and other technologies.
In contrast, Ms Ariel Ng's nine-year-old daughter has only used an AI tool at home once, before she was warned never to do it again. "She talked to it as though she thought it was a real person … That concerned me," Ms Ng said of the time her child chatted with the Meta AI function on her phone's WhatsApp application."From the way she used it, it made me feel like she doesn't know what she's doing."The 37-year-old ergonomist added that her husband also tried expressing thoughts of self-harm to a generative-AI tool as an experiment, and found that the chatbot responded in a manner encouraging such worrying behaviour.This made her wary of the possible dangers her daughter might face while interacting with AI.
