We need a safe word

A 14-year-old began research into Gen Alpha slang because she realised her parents couldn't tell whether she and her brother were squabbling, fighting or just chatting. Manisha Mehta recently presented her paper on her generation's fast-changing slang at a global summit. An app is now in the works, to help keep parents in the loop. AI must be trained differently too, she says

- Anesha George

It might interest you to know that the emoji depicting a cluster of kidney beans, among children under 16, stands for “self-identified incel”. “Bop” can mean a girl is promiscuous. “KYS”, once “Know yourself”, can now instead mean “Kill yourself”.

It's hard to know the difference, adults are finding. It might interest you know that AI can't tell the difference either.

The fact that neither the algorithms nor her parents could identify signs of danger in Gen Alpha slang concerned Manisha Mehta so much that the 14-year-old high-school student from California decided last year that she had to do something about it.

She began by enlisting the help of her father, Virendra Mehta, who was then pursuing a PhD in Al (he has since completed it). He put her in touch with computer science professor Fausto Giunchiglia at University of Trento, Italy, and the teenager and the scholar got to work.

First, they decided to assess just how large the gap was, by having parents complete a survey that tested their understanding of 100 terms of slang used by Gen Alpha (born between 2010 and 2024).

Their findings were so dramatic that she ended up lead author of a research paper (with Giunchiglia as supervisor and coauthor), which she then presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)in Athens, inJune.