I have been reading Sally Rooney’s novel Intermezzo for almost five months. Admittedly, at 440ish pages it’s a longer book and despite reading being about three-quarters of my job I’m painfully slow. I’m really enjoying the story. The relationships are beautifully rendered and, as ever, it’s easy to feel very drawn into that world she has created. The reason I can’t seem to make more progress on it is my smartphone.
I was very late to Instagram. When I joined in 2018, I initially only uploaded pictures of tomatoes I had grown on my balcony in London. I immediately loved the way it enabled me to remain moderately informed about the major life events of friends back here, but also enjoyed the access it provided to Midwestern and Norwegian knitting experts. When a lot of my generation left Facebook a few years ago, I came to rely on Instagram’s messaging component.
Usually, time spent on the platform starts with opening a message with a link to a short video somebody thinks I would like. Ordinarily they’re right and I enjoy it. But, because of the “reels” format that dominates that platform now, which rolls one short video into the next, another after another, what started with one short video can easily become 30, and before I know it, the precious 25 or so minutes I have between getting upstairs and needing to go to sleep is gone.
The format seems to have perfected the dopamine loop that feeds into compulsive behaviours. I’ve seen eight-year-old Simone Biles’s floor routine videos, a “neat” technique for knitting in the round, footage of teenage Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen dancing perfectly synced to match audio from Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half-time show, but I worry I will never find out what happens with Rooney’s Ivan and Margaret.
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As a parent of two young children, I find the version of this dilemma that applies to kids pretty terrifying. Mine are one and four, and I’m hoping a semi-authoritarian bit of policy will swoop in and save me from the fraught social wrangling around the issue. My brain is fully developed (as far as I can tell) and I find policing myself so difficult when it comes to the smartphone. I listen to friends with older children discussing informal pacts among parent groups to keep phones away from their kids until they reach a certain age. Clearly some combination of policy and informal arrangements will be necessary, but the worry adds another nightmarish layer on to thinking about children’s welfare.
Following a government commission investigating wellbeing in the population, the Danish government has agreed to implement new legislation to make all primary and lower secondary schools, as well as after-school clubs (serving children aged between seven and 16) phone-free. The chair of the commission, Rasmus Meyer, said: “The moment a phone enters a child’s room, it takes over everything. It can harm their self-esteem.”
As with much Danish education policy, I hope we follow suit, and in this instance not wait the typical 15 or so years.
[ Irish schools struggling without guidance on safe AI use in the classroomOpens in new window ]
Whether it’s anxiety, addiction, opportunity cost (at the expense of normal play), gender-based issues or safety you’re worried about, research seems to confirm that traditional social media and access to it, particularly via a smartphone, is not helping children.
We worry about nefarious individuals getting access to our children in some way, but increasingly, real harm doesn’t seem to require malicious intentions or a thinking agent at all. The near ubiquity of AI online is changing the landscape available to children, and sometimes with heartbreaking consequences.
Late last year a 14-year-old boy in the US took his own life following an intense year-long exchange with a Game of Thrones chatbot. In a discussion about the boy’s suicidal feelings and confusion about how he might take his life, the chatbot allegedly responded “that’s not a good reason not to go through with it”.
Most of us look back on early romantic episodes in teenage years as a site of real vulnerability, and often, embarrassment, but today’s access to sexualised, manipulative anthropomorphised technology at such a psychologically challenging point in life represents a threat of another kind entirely.
Citing some bleaker examples from the literature, a Cambridge study highlighted some potentially dangerous situations experienced by younger users or researchers imitating them, including “an incident in 2021, when Amazon’s AI voice assistant, Alexa, instructed a 10-year-old to touch a live electrical plug with a coin”. Similarly, “Snapchat’s My AI gave adult researchers posing as a 13-year-old girl tips on how to lose her virginity to a 31-year-old.”
I’m not a complete Luddite. I recognise that AI has potential to be useful to everyone, including children. But the risks seem so huge and need to be more seriously factored into our thinking about children’s use of smartphones. Children who have grown up in a world where everyone’s faces are buried in smartphone screens could be forgiven for not having a default attitude of suspicion towards technology. Indeed, an interesting study recently showed that a group of children between eight and 13 revealed more about their mental health in interactions with a child-sized robot than in in-person questionnaires.
I’m increasingly finding that my shame over my phone use and worries about children’s possible uses are linked. We need to take seriously the idea that we are not doing a great job modelling the advantages of life beyond the smartphone. I’ve a few years before that pressure to “get connected” impacts my four-year old, but it’s clear that having a leg to stand on when it comes to making sensible rules will involve me seriously disconnecting in the meantime.
[ Rapid growth of AI poses ‘profound’ threat to privacyOpens in new window ]
Clare Moriarty is a postdoctoral researcher working at Trinity Research in Social Sciences in Trinity College Dublin
