AI: What parents need to know

Published 03/03/2026.  Last updated 07/08/2026

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It is a term used to describe computer systems that can do things typically associated with human intelligence, like learning, problem-solving, communicating, or creating things.

AI systems have been around from as early as the 1950s. In 1997, the chess-playing AI system “Deep Blue” became the first computer programme to beat a human chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In the last few years, thanks to the vast amount of digital content that now exists, a newer type of AI system has been developed: Generative AI.

Generative AI can create text, pictures, videos, and sound, based on massive amounts of training data. Some examples of Generative AI systems are ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Young members of the Scottish Children’s Parliament have created a series of 2-minute videos explaining the basics of AI and its relation to children available on YouTube.

Webinar 1: Everything you want to know about AI | YouTube

Webinar 2: Ethics and children’s rights | YouTube

Webinar 3 - Artificial Intelligence AI and children's learning

The process of training and running an AI model described in the section below (How do Generative AI systems work?) highlights some safety and ethical issues to be aware of, particularly when it comes to your child’s use of AI.

First, Generative AI systems can’t be your child’s friend in the same way that a human can. Children treating AI systems like close friends or romantic partners can lead to dangerous misconceptions about healthy relationships, the inadvertent sharing of sensitive data, and in the most extreme cases, sextortion and even suicide.

Read more:

TES.com: Article on AI Girlfriend apps

BBC article: Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI
[WARNING This page shows distressing content relating to suicide]

Common Sense Media: AI chatbots and friendship

Parents' Ultimate Guides | Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media: Parents' ultimate guides

Before a Generative AI system can generate text, images, videos, or sounds, it needs to be trained with lots of examples. This is called training data. To get a hold of this data, technology companies have accessed whatever content they can find on the internet, sometimes without the permission of the writers, artists, and internet-users who have created the content, and in some cases without considering copyright laws.

During the training phase, computer programmes find patterns in the data and generate a model which can predict the most likely sequences of words (in the case of AI text generators) or arrangements of pixels (in the case of AI image generators), given a specific prompt.

A massive amount of computing power is needed for this. The computers doing this work sit in data centres, which are warehouses full of computers. They need large amounts of energy to run, and water to keep cool – just like how a games console gets really hot when you've been playing it for a while, these computers heat up when doing lots of calculations.

Watch this video about the environmental footprint of data centres (13 min).

This video shows an example of a new approach to reduce the environmental footprint of data centres.

After the training phase, humans are brought in to refine the model: data workers look at thousands of examples of the model’s output and rate how good they think it is. This work is difficult, as it may involve looking at distressing text or images.

Guardian article: Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI.

When you prompt a Generative AI system, it is not doing a live search of a fact-checked database or even of the internet to answer your query–-it is using a model that was trained previously (several months or years ago, depending on the model you are using) to produce a plausible sounding string of words associated with that query.

This means the output is unreliable. Sometimes it is factually incorrect, and sometimes it misrepresents things in subtle ways, hallucinating plausible quotes, references, and places that don’t exist, or it produces biased responses which reflect biases in the training data.

AI tools are already used by both adults and children. It is important that as part of digital literacy they understand the advantages and risks around AI tools. Learning about AI will equip children to make better decisions when they explore AI tools without the supervision of their families or teachers—as we know they will do at some point.

It’s important to always remember that Generative AI systems are machines that can’t think and feel. They don’t work by magic, even though advanced technology can sometimes feel that way.

This 5 minute animated video answers the question, “Can Machines Think?.

For advice on children’s online safety issues, the organisations below have free resources:

Internet Matters

NSPCC

Young Women’s Movement

Other things to be aware of

Your child might be exposed to factually incorrect, misleading, biased, inappropriate, and/or distressing output when interacting with a Generative AI system. Below are some useful tips.

Digital and Information and Media Literacy can help guard against this. Make sure your child knows how to verify information using trusted sources. The following organisations have some useful resources for children to help them do this. Children should be aware of who they can talk to if they see any content that upsets or worries them. If they require any support with information literacy, such as fact checking or AI generated content, they can speak with a librarian in their setting, school or in the community.

Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose

BBC Verify

The Ferret

Young Scot: How to spot deepfakes

Young Scot: How to fact check

Using Generative AI tools too much could affect critical thinking skills.

Model Critical Thinking yourself. Question what you see and hear, discuss different viewpoints, and talk through your reasoning. Nurture your child's natural curiosity and support them to explore their interests beyond schoolwork.

More details and tips can be found in the Psychology Today: Is AI ruining your kid's critical thinking article.

Your child might be worried about the environmental and social costs of training and running AI models, or have other ethical concerns about using AI, such as not seeing themselves represented in biased output, or not wanting to share their data with Big Tech companies.

Tip: Make sure your child knows their rights in the digital environment. You can show them this poster. Empower your child to voice their concerns at home, at school, in their local community, and further afield.

Currently, the most popular Generative AI systems are not designed for children. Whether or not you or your child use them, it is still important to discuss and understand what they are, and what they are not.

Because AI tools are already widely used by both adults and children, it is important that AI Literacy is taught in schools. We should ensure that children are taught enough about how AI works to help them understand how to use it wisely and for what sort of tasks. They should also be part of discussions about the ethics of new technology like this, so they have a say in how it affects their lives. AI literacy will equip children to make better decisions when they explore AI tools without the supervision of their families or teachers—as we know they will do at some point.

 A new curriculum for learning with and about AI is being developed for Scottish schools. The curriculum development was led by Professor Judy Robertson, Chair in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, with input from colleagues in the Data Education in Schools team, the Scottish Government, Education Scotland, SQA, the Scottish AI Alliance, the Children’s Parliament, and teachers and young people.

Since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted into Scots Law, schools are bound by law to uphold children’s rights. Therefore, the new AI curriculum puts Ethics and Children’s Rights at the centre of any learning with or about AI in schools. 

You can read more about the new AI curriculum for Scotland at https://trails.scot. There you will also find resources that teachers might use with Upper Primary and Secondary learners.

Some resources from trails.scot that might also be useful for using at home with your child include:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/teachers-and-parents-weigh-benefits-and-risks-of-artificial-intelligence-in-schools [thumbnail]

[Caption: Watch this video of American teachers and parents weighing in on the risk and benefits of AI use in schools.]

As with all technologies that your child might engage with, be it video games, social media, or AI, talk to your child about their experience of the technology.

Examples of questions you could ask your child include:

  • What do you like or don’t like about it?
  • Is there anything you are worried about while using it?
  • Do you feel it affects you in any positive or negative ways?
  • In what situations would you use it? When should you not use it?

By modelling responsible use of technology and exploring it together as a family, you can help your child to use it responsibly.

You can help your child to understand that technology, including Generative AI is created by people. Even if the products and tools currently available might not be as safe, ethical, or as useful as we expect or demand them to be, it does not mean we have to accept it. We can all have a say, including your child, and maybe one day they will be the one designing better technologies for humanity.

Depending on which local authority your child’s school is in, they may have access to either Copilot or Gemini. Encourage your child to speak to their teacher(s) to see which versions of Generative AI are being used in their setting or school.

Here are some ways you can have fun with your child at home:

Scottish Government have published a set of Guidelines and Guardrails on the safe, fair and ethical use of AI in Scotland’s schools. The guidance aims to support those working in schools to use AI in a fair, safe and ethical way. It provides information on the potential benefits of using AI and the issues to be mindful of, while giving examples of how AI can be used appropriately in the classroom.

It is important that human relationships remain at the heart of education, and the guidance makes clear that AI must enhance, not replace, those connections. For pupils, that means using AI as a tool to support creativity, critical thinking and personalised learning, while protecting their rights and privacy. For teachers, it means having the confidence, professional autonomy and practical support to decide when and how AI adds value in their classroom. The guidance has been developed jointly with the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) and with input from local government, Education Scotland and others, in response to the growth in the use of AI across society.

Common Sense Media: Parents' Ultimate Guide to Generative AI

Childrens Parliament: Exploring Children’s Rights and A.I

Childrens Parliament: Exploring Children’s Rights and A.I - Final report (PDF)

Microsoft copilot for individuals

Scottish AI Alliance: What is Artificial Intelligence?

Callscotland - Search on topic of AI

Adobe Express - create templates.

Guidance on how AI can be misused to create or manipulate images of children and how to respond if an incident occurs

Information on careers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be found on My World of Work.
^ Back to top

AI: What parents need to know

Published 03/03/2026.  Last updated 07/08/2026

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It is a term used to describe computer systems that can do things typically associated with human intelligence, like learning, problem-solving, communicating, or creating things.

AI systems have been around from as early as the 1950s. In 1997, the chess-playing AI system “Deep Blue” became the first computer programme to beat a human chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In the last few years, thanks to the vast amount of digital content that now exists, a newer type of AI system has been developed: Generative AI.

Generative AI can create text, pictures, videos, and sound, based on massive amounts of training data. Some examples of Generative AI systems are ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Young members of the Scottish Children’s Parliament have created a series of 2-minute videos explaining the basics of AI and its relation to children available on YouTube.

Webinar 1: Everything you want to know about AI | YouTube

Webinar 2: Ethics and children’s rights | YouTube

Webinar 3 - Artificial Intelligence AI and children's learning

The process of training and running an AI model described in the section below (How do Generative AI systems work?) highlights some safety and ethical issues to be aware of, particularly when it comes to your child’s use of AI.

First, Generative AI systems can’t be your child’s friend in the same way that a human can. Children treating AI systems like close friends or romantic partners can lead to dangerous misconceptions about healthy relationships, the inadvertent sharing of sensitive data, and in the most extreme cases, sextortion and even suicide.

Read more:

TES.com: Article on AI Girlfriend apps

BBC article: Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI
[WARNING This page shows distressing content relating to suicide]

Common Sense Media: AI chatbots and friendship

Parents' Ultimate Guides | Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media: Parents' ultimate guides

Before a Generative AI system can generate text, images, videos, or sounds, it needs to be trained with lots of examples. This is called training data. To get a hold of this data, technology companies have accessed whatever content they can find on the internet, sometimes without the permission of the writers, artists, and internet-users who have created the content, and in some cases without considering copyright laws.

During the training phase, computer programmes find patterns in the data and generate a model which can predict the most likely sequences of words (in the case of AI text generators) or arrangements of pixels (in the case of AI image generators), given a specific prompt.

A massive amount of computing power is needed for this. The computers doing this work sit in data centres, which are warehouses full of computers. They need large amounts of energy to run, and water to keep cool – just like how a games console gets really hot when you've been playing it for a while, these computers heat up when doing lots of calculations.

Watch this video about the environmental footprint of data centres (13 min).

This video shows an example of a new approach to reduce the environmental footprint of data centres.

After the training phase, humans are brought in to refine the model: data workers look at thousands of examples of the model’s output and rate how good they think it is. This work is difficult, as it may involve looking at distressing text or images.

Guardian article: Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI.

When you prompt a Generative AI system, it is not doing a live search of a fact-checked database or even of the internet to answer your query–-it is using a model that was trained previously (several months or years ago, depending on the model you are using) to produce a plausible sounding string of words associated with that query.

This means the output is unreliable. Sometimes it is factually incorrect, and sometimes it misrepresents things in subtle ways, hallucinating plausible quotes, references, and places that don’t exist, or it produces biased responses which reflect biases in the training data.

AI tools are already used by both adults and children. It is important that as part of digital literacy they understand the advantages and risks around AI tools. Learning about AI will equip children to make better decisions when they explore AI tools without the supervision of their families or teachers—as we know they will do at some point.

It’s important to always remember that Generative AI systems are machines that can’t think and feel. They don’t work by magic, even though advanced technology can sometimes feel that way.

This 5 minute animated video answers the question, “Can Machines Think?.

For advice on children’s online safety issues, the organisations below have free resources:

Internet Matters

NSPCC

Young Women’s Movement

Other things to be aware of

Your child might be exposed to factually incorrect, misleading, biased, inappropriate, and/or distressing output when interacting with a Generative AI system. Below are some useful tips.

Digital and Information and Media Literacy can help guard against this. Make sure your child knows how to verify information using trusted sources. The following organisations have some useful resources for children to help them do this. Children should be aware of who they can talk to if they see any content that upsets or worries them. If they require any support with information literacy, such as fact checking or AI generated content, they can speak with a librarian in their setting, school or in the community.

Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose

BBC Verify

The Ferret

Young Scot: How to spot deepfakes

Young Scot: How to fact check

Using Generative AI tools too much could affect critical thinking skills.

Model Critical Thinking yourself. Question what you see and hear, discuss different viewpoints, and talk through your reasoning. Nurture your child's natural curiosity and support them to explore their interests beyond schoolwork.

More details and tips can be found in the Psychology Today: Is AI ruining your kid's critical thinking article.

Your child might be worried about the environmental and social costs of training and running AI models, or have other ethical concerns about using AI, such as not seeing themselves represented in biased output, or not wanting to share their data with Big Tech companies.

Tip: Make sure your child knows their rights in the digital environment. You can show them this poster. Empower your child to voice their concerns at home, at school, in their local community, and further afield.

Currently, the most popular Generative AI systems are not designed for children. Whether or not you or your child use them, it is still important to discuss and understand what they are, and what they are not.

Because AI tools are already widely used by both adults and children, it is important that AI Literacy is taught in schools. We should ensure that children are taught enough about how AI works to help them understand how to use it wisely and for what sort of tasks. They should also be part of discussions about the ethics of new technology like this, so they have a say in how it affects their lives. AI literacy will equip children to make better decisions when they explore AI tools without the supervision of their families or teachers—as we know they will do at some point.

 A new curriculum for learning with and about AI is being developed for Scottish schools. The curriculum development was led by Professor Judy Robertson, Chair in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, with input from colleagues in the Data Education in Schools team, the Scottish Government, Education Scotland, SQA, the Scottish AI Alliance, the Children’s Parliament, and teachers and young people.

Since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted into Scots Law, schools are bound by law to uphold children’s rights. Therefore, the new AI curriculum puts Ethics and Children’s Rights at the centre of any learning with or about AI in schools. 

You can read more about the new AI curriculum for Scotland at https://trails.scot. There you will also find resources that teachers might use with Upper Primary and Secondary learners.

Some resources from trails.scot that might also be useful for using at home with your child include:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/teachers-and-parents-weigh-benefits-and-risks-of-artificial-intelligence-in-schools [thumbnail]

[Caption: Watch this video of American teachers and parents weighing in on the risk and benefits of AI use in schools.]

As with all technologies that your child might engage with, be it video games, social media, or AI, talk to your child about their experience of the technology.

Examples of questions you could ask your child include:

  • What do you like or don’t like about it?
  • Is there anything you are worried about while using it?
  • Do you feel it affects you in any positive or negative ways?
  • In what situations would you use it? When should you not use it?

By modelling responsible use of technology and exploring it together as a family, you can help your child to use it responsibly.

You can help your child to understand that technology, including Generative AI is created by people. Even if the products and tools currently available might not be as safe, ethical, or as useful as we expect or demand them to be, it does not mean we have to accept it. We can all have a say, including your child, and maybe one day they will be the one designing better technologies for humanity.

Depending on which local authority your child’s school is in, they may have access to either Copilot or Gemini. Encourage your child to speak to their teacher(s) to see which versions of Generative AI are being used in their setting or school.

Here are some ways you can have fun with your child at home:

Scottish Government have published a set of Guidelines and Guardrails on the safe, fair and ethical use of AI in Scotland’s schools. The guidance aims to support those working in schools to use AI in a fair, safe and ethical way. It provides information on the potential benefits of using AI and the issues to be mindful of, while giving examples of how AI can be used appropriately in the classroom.

It is important that human relationships remain at the heart of education, and the guidance makes clear that AI must enhance, not replace, those connections. For pupils, that means using AI as a tool to support creativity, critical thinking and personalised learning, while protecting their rights and privacy. For teachers, it means having the confidence, professional autonomy and practical support to decide when and how AI adds value in their classroom. The guidance has been developed jointly with the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) and with input from local government, Education Scotland and others, in response to the growth in the use of AI across society.

Common Sense Media: Parents' Ultimate Guide to Generative AI

Childrens Parliament: Exploring Children’s Rights and A.I

Childrens Parliament: Exploring Children’s Rights and A.I - Final report (PDF)

Microsoft copilot for individuals

Scottish AI Alliance: What is Artificial Intelligence?

Callscotland - Search on topic of AI

Adobe Express - create templates.

Guidance on how AI can be misused to create or manipulate images of children and how to respond if an incident occurs

Information on careers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be found on My World of Work.
^ Back to top