Artificial intelligence is a thing of the future?
Not at all!
AI has long been part of our everyday family life.
From facial recognition in smartphones and ‘intelligent’ toys in the children’s room to making work easier at school or at work.
What does this mean for us parents and how should we deal with it?
Where is AI everywhere?
AI, or artificial intelligence, is increasingly finding its way into our lives.
By this term, we mean computer systems that are trained to behave like intelligent beings.
For example, they can solve tasks, answer questions, recognize faces – and they can learn from their own mistakes.
And with all this, they no longer seem like technical devices to us as users, but almost like a “real” counterpart.
In everyday life, we therefore come into contact with AI tools more often than we think.
We use these AI tools in everyday family life
Sometimes we use the offers quite consciously – sometimes there is AI in them where we might not have expected it.
Because intelligent systems really are already everywhere:
- Even the smallest family members order their favorite hits from Alexa and co. Digital assistants are just waiting to play music for us, set an alarm clock or order new socks.
The AI systems are trained to understand and implement voice commands.
They answer our questions and search for the right information for us.
- Some learning and knowledge apps use AI systems.
For example, children can learn about flowers, bird calls or animals with nature apps or Google Lens to identify them.
- Schoolchildren have their reading done by chat programs such as ChatGPT to summarize their reading.
And sometimes the systems based on language models can also spontaneously invent a bedtime story or present us with a recipe for the leftovers in the fridge, thus saving us parents from an imbalance in the family bliss.
- Designing greeting cards, setting poems to music or creating action clips – creative AI tools for editing images, sound or video are fun and the whole family can try their hand at creativity. Webhelm presents some AI tools on its website.
- Social media like TikTok and messengers like WhatsApp are constantly finding new ways to harness AI.
Whether for facial recognition, photo filters, searching for contacts or as a chat partner like the chatbot Snapchat AI– Children and young people find the constantly new functions exciting and enjoy trying them out.
- Store at Amazon, watch movies at Disney+ or listen to music on Spotify – There is an AI everywhere that closely monitors our usage behavior in order to display certain content, set prices or even answer questions.
- Useful services such as online banking or navigation are also often supported by AI.
Companies use AI tools to tailor their product range to us, for advice and to prevent fraud.
Pretty clever – or problematic?
All these applications are now quite sophisticated and are convenient and helpful in many situations.
No wonder we are happy to use them in everyday family life.
Nevertheless, it is important that we are aware of what is behind the smart devices and also keep an eye on the stumbling blocks and challenges in their use.
These are, for example:
- Susceptibility to errors: AI systems access large amounts of data – but they can also make mistakes.
Especially when we use AI to make homework or information searches easier, we always have to double-check the results and rework them ourselves.
- Monetary goals: In addition to the benefits for us, the main aim of AI offerings for manufacturers is to earn money.
We should definitely be aware of this and examine offers against this background.
- Data protection: Every AI application not only spits out data – it also always collects data.
We should therefore think carefully about what information and data we want to feed it with.
- Sustainability: AI applications are backed by immense server power and therefore high energy consumption.
How can parents deal with this?
This poses a particular challenge for parents: we use AI tools ourselves in everyday life and want to make our children fit to deal with the latest media offerings – and at the same time protect them from the dangers.
First of all, it is important to stay informed and keep in touch.
Make use of information services and parents’ evenings, educate yourself and question your own use.
Together with your child, think about which AI tools you would like to use in everyday family life, where AI is useful to you and where it should be used with caution.
Establish rules together – especially on the subject of data protection – and decide what is used and how.
This also includes setting devices safely and, for example, consciously controlling the data usage of apps.
Services such as the website medien-kindersicher.
