Children’s 12 calls for AI implementation in Scotland

17 Oct 2024

Last year, we spoke to Gregory Metcalfe from the Children’s Parliament in our member magazine, Insight, about a project placing children’s views at the forefront of AI implementation in Scotland (click here to read an interview excerpt).

One year on, Gregory updates us on the project, now into its final stage, and explains how children are calling for action to be taken on how AI impacts their lives now and in the future.

The ‘Exploring Children’s Rights and AI’ project – run in partnership between Children’s Parliament, the Scottish AI Alliance, and The Alan Turing Institute – was set up to uncover the relationship between AI and children’s rights through exploratory, rights-based workshops with 100 children in four schools across Scotland.

Taking a child rights approach, we supported all children and adults involved to see in practice the importance and value of understanding children's rights, seeing them enacted, and being supported by adults who respect and value their views and experiences. I was invited to contribute this blog post now because we have just reached a key milestone – the launch of our stage 2 report (click here to view).

Watch a short film on stage 2 of the project

"AI will be in all our lives, so we need to know what it means and how it works before we grow up." —Member of Children’s Parliament (MCP), age 9, Shetland

Our new report provides an in-depth account of the past year of work on the project, with a focus on the series of workshops we carried out with children, adult professionals working with AI, and artists. These workshops allowed the children to explore four key themes relating to AI and their rights (which they themselves had identified as significant areas of interest in stage 1 of the project). They also provided our ‘AI partners’ (a mix of private, third and public sector organisations working on projects involving AI) with a chance to find out what children thought and felt about the work they were doing and to take steps to incorporate these views into their own projects.

From these workshops, the children developed 12 calls to action (click here to view) – the changes that they believe decision-makers need to enact for children’s human rights to be upheld in the development and use of AI in Scotland.

Watch the children explain these calls to action in their own words

The calls to action reflect the breadth and depth of the work that the children have done on this topic, as well as how capable they are of engaging with this complex ethical field. In these calls, the children expressed concerns over whether AI systems would consider children’s diverse needs and experiences, they had clear demands for children’s data privacy to be taken seriously, and felt there was need for more child-friendly information on how AI systems are being used in the services that children access.

A key takeaway for the Children’s Parliament team was the significant role that learning about their rights, alongside learning about AI, played as the children felt empowered to interrogate the ways in which AI was being used, identifying for themselves where the development and use of AI might have unintended consequences for children and their rights. Likewise, they were also able to envision many ways in which AI could be used to support children’s rights in the future, from increasing access to healthcare to supporting their teachers to create fun and engaging lessons.

These calls to action represent a conclusion to two years of work with all 100 children involved in the project and some fantastic work from our 12 ‘Investigators’ (the three children from each school who acted as representatives for their peers) in particular. Across all of the sessions carried out – in person workshops in schools, Investigator video calls, public-facing events, activity packs sent out to classes – Children’s Parliament gathered a huge amount of evidence on what children thought and felt about the issues we were examining and how they related to children’s rights. The team sifted through all of this recorded evidence – most of it in the form of verbatim quotes from the children – pulling out key themes and editing it down to a long-list of around 30 statements reflecting what children had told us in their own words. It was then our Investigators task to whittle this list down to our final 12 and, most importantly, to decide upon the actions that they wanted decision-makers to take to address the issues they had identified.

Now that the calls to action have been published and shared directly with key stakeholders from the Scottish Government and various relevant organisations by the children themselves at a special event in June, it is in the hands of adult duty-bearers to take up the call and enact the changes that children have asked for.

In support of the children’s calls to action on education, Children’s Parliament and the Scottish AI Alliance have now started work on a new phase of the project focused on developing learning resources for children and adults around AI and children’s rights based on the creative and inclusive approaches used on the project so far.

Click here to find out more about Exploring Children’s Rights and AI