I'm an AI developer. Here's how I'm raising my son

I help build artificial intelligence systems and even I know there are real reasons to be concerned about how AI affects our children.

- Soulaiman Itani

"Daddy, who is that man?" my four-year-old son, Omie, asked recently, after barging into my office.

As a single father who works mostly from home, it’s an interruption I look forward to. On video calls with colleagues who work around the world, I will sometimes put Omie on my lap and introduce him.

But this time I wasn’t on a video call. I didn’t know who he was referring to until I glanced at my screen: It was displaying an ultra-realistic avatar with animated mouth movements, part of a project to create artificial intelligence actors with their own personalities and performance styles. Omie had assumed it was a new coworker.

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since. I'm a developer who has led several AI projects, including Google’s LaMDA, a conversational large language model that preceded Gemini. I think these technologies are important because they can ultimately help us solve some problems more quickly, allowing us to focus more of our time and energy on bigger priorities, professional and personal alike.

Yet even I have trepidations about what kind of future my son will grow up in as AI progresses. And I am far from alone: In a recent survey, 61 per cent of parents said they worry that the increasing use of AI will harm students’ critical thinking skills. Will using large language models (which power tools like ChatGPT) hurt children’s development, or will not using them hinder their future employment prospects?