About one fifth of Irish children and teenagers use AI tools to write essays or stories for school and to summarise longer texts, a new survey suggests.
Ireland (at 19 per cent) was, however, among the three countries with the lowest proportion of children using AI for school-related tasks, after Malta (15 per cent) and Finland (14 per cent).
This compares to almost half of the children surveyed in Belgium (48 per cent) and Portugal (47 per cent), according to the report from EU Kids Online, a multinational research network co-ordinated by the University of Oslo.
More than 28,000 children and teenagers aged between 10 and 16 were surveyed across 19 European countries, including Ireland, with the study finding that most children (87 per cent) use their phone every day to go online.
Some 805 Irish children and teenagers were surveyed as part of the project, which found that AI tools such as ChatGPT are “fully embedded” in the digital lives of most European children.
While one in three children, on average, said they had not used any AI tool in the previous month, the proportion ranged from 57 per cent in Ireland to 11 per cent in Italy.
Among the Irish children who said they had used the technology, 19 per cent said they used it to write essays or stories for school, compared to 33 per cent overall.
Similarly, 19 per cent of Irish respondents said they used it to summarise or explain a longer text, compared to 34 per cent across the 19 countries.
Overall, 14 per cent of children and teenagers said they had used AI tools to “talk about my worries and get advice” while 4 per cent said they used them to create “deep fakes”.
Some 41 per cent of children across the 19 countries also expressed concern that AI “may surpass human intelligence in a way that makes it impossible for humans to maintain control over it”.
Separately, the report found that 30 per cent of all participants had encountered hateful messages online “at least every month”. The rate varied across countries, with 15 per cent of Irish children saying they saw hateful messages at least once a month compared to 40 per cent in Serbia.
When broken down by age, 12 per cent of Irish 10-year-olds reported seeing hateful messages, rising to 74 per cent of those aged 15 or 16.
Asked about potentially harmful online content, “gory” or violent images of people hurting other people or animals were the most commonly reported category overall (40 per cent).
About a third (30 per cent) of Irish children said they had encountered such imagery online. A further 28 per cent of Irish participants said they saw content about dares or challenges that might “seriously hurt or kill you”.
A similar proportion (26 per cent) of Irish children had encountered content relating to ways of physically harming or hurting oneself and content surrounding “ways to be very thin”.
The survey also found a “sharp rise” in the proportion of children who have been upset online in the previous month, rising from 7 per cent in 2020 to 23 per cent in the latest survey.
Some 48 per cent of children overall said they felt safe online, down from 65 per cent in 2020.
“More surprisingly, only 50 per cent of children say their parents talk to them about what they do online, compared with 66 per cent in 2020. Instead, parents are relying more on parental controls,” said Sonia Livingstone, co-author of the report.
The report is being launched on Thursday at Dublin Castle during a conference on online safety being held as part of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union.