Growing up safely with AI

Technology companies have the greatest influence on how safely children and young people navigate the internet. 

We demand that tech companies:

• Companies should review the impact of their AI tools on children and young people and implement appropriate protective measures such as safety-by-design. This includes, among other things, impact assessments on children's rights, age-appropriate default settings, and strict minimization of data usage.
• Implement effective safeguards against abuse and genuinely verify age information. This includes targeted action against AI-generated sexualized content and deepfakes of children and young people – through technical safeguards against the creation of such content and effective reporting and deletion mechanisms.
• commit to not using manipulative and addictive design patterns (e.g. endless usage loops, variable reward mechanisms, deliberately humanized interactions) that aim for the longest possible dwell time rather than the well-being of the users.
• Clearly and understandably label AI-generated content so that children and young people can recognize whether they are interacting with a machine, with AI-generated images/videos, or with real people and content.

Parents and educators face the challenge of guiding children and young people in a world that is rapidly changing due to AI – and which is also new to them. Universities, educational institutions, and research institutions play a central role here. 

We call on the Federal Government to provide sufficient funding for relevant studies and projects by universities, educational and research institutions so that they:

• They can develop action-oriented guidelines from their scientific findings to help guide children and young people, their parents or caregivers, and educational staff in the critical handling of AI.
• to continuously and independently research the long-term effects of AI use – especially companion chatbots and personalized recommendation systems – on the psychological and social development of children and adolescents and to make the results publicly available.
• AI skills training can be developed in an age-appropriate way directly for children and young people – not just as an offer for parents and professionals, but as independent, understandable knowledge for young people themselves.
• Parents, educators, and other caregivers can be empowered, for example, by promoting AI skills programs and training. Furthermore, the government should facilitate ongoing dialogue between regulatory authorities, civil society, research institutions, and industry.

We need laws that protect the rights of children and young people and create clear regulations for tech companies so that businesses can live up to their responsibilities.

Therefore, we demand of the governments:

• to ensure that existing laws are implemented – and to supplement them where new risks from AI are not yet covered, for example through binding rules for companion chatbots, effective age verification instead of mere self-declaration and the consistent application of the transparency obligations of the EU AI Act to minors.
• To make child rights impact assessments for AI systems mandatory.
• To create or strengthen independent supervisory bodies with effective audit and sanctioning powers that regularly and publicly monitor compliance with the regulations – without real consequences, regulations remain ineffective.
• to ensure the participation of children and young people in political decision-making processes concerning AI.
• To recognize children and young people as independent AI users.
• to advocate for internationally agreed minimum standards and to ensure that protective measures apply not only in individual markets, but also to children in the Global South, where oversight and enforcement are often weaker.

Children and young people are the experts in their own lives. Protection alone is not enough: Young people must be taken seriously as legal entities and actively involved in shaping their digital future.

We demand that politics, science and business work together:

• Systematically and age-appropriately involve children and young people in the development, testing and evaluation of AI systems and AI regulation – for example through youth advisory boards, consultations and participatory study formats, as already formed the basis of the preliminary study.
• Ensure that the perspectives of particularly vulnerable children – such as children in care, with disabilities or refugees – are specifically taken into account in these processes.
• Provide understandable, age-appropriate information formats about AI systems so that young people can actually demand their rights in the digital space.