Oxford Researchers Propose Guidelines to Assess AI's Influence on Mental Health of Children and Teens
A new peer-reviewed highlights the need for a clear framework when it comes to AI research, given the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence by children and adolescents using digital devices to access the internet and social media. The findings published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, calls for a “critical re-evaluation” of how we study the impact of internet-based technologies on young people’s mental health, and outlines where future AI research can learn from several pitfalls of social media research. Existing limitations include inconsistent findings and a lack of longitudinal, causal studies.
The analysis and recommendations by the Oxford researchers are divided into four sections:
A brief review of recent research on the effects of technology on children’s and adolescents’ mental health, highlighting key limitations to the evidence.
An analysis of the challenges in the design and interpretation of research that they believe underlie these limitations.
Proposals for improving research methods to address these challenges, with a focus on how they can apply to the study of AI and children’s wellbeing.
Concrete steps for collaboration between researchers, policymakers, big tech, caregivers and young people.
The authors propose that effective research on AI will ask questions that don’t implicitly problematise AI, ensure causal designs, and prioritise the most relevant exposures and outcomes.
The paper concludes that as young people adopt new ways of interacting with AI, research and evidence-based policy will struggle to keep up. However, by ensuring our approach to investigating the impact of AI on young people reflects the learnings of past research’s shortcomings, we can more effectively regulate the integration of AI into online platforms, and how they are used.
Reference: From social media to artificial intelligence: improving research on digital harms in youth, Mansfield, Karen L et al. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Volume 0, Issue 0
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