Inauguration of Executive Director of Youth AI Safety Research Institute... “Self-harm, mental illness, and cognitive outsourcing are serious.”

Inauguration of Executive Director of Youth AI Safety Research Institute... “Self-harm, mental illness, and cognitive outsourcing are serious.”

(San Francisco = Yonhap News) Correspondent Kwon Young-jeon = A former executive who led the safety team at Google warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is more harmful to children and adolescents than social networking services (SNS).

Tom Segal, former vice president of trust and safety at Google, said this in an interview with Reuters on the 22nd (local time) upon taking office as the first executive director of the 'Youth AI Safety Research Institute' established by the civic group 'Common Sense Media'.

“We are facing a very dire situation when it comes to the impact of AI on children,” Siegel said. “It is unrealistic to think that the tech industry will solve the problem on its own without outside help.”

In particular, he criticized large technology companies, saying they are repeating the same mistakes they made when developing SNS in the AI ​​field, and that they are offering services for children without providing sufficient safety measures.

He said, “We are facing a very serious damage scenario,” and cited youth suicide, mental illness, and “cognitive outsourcing,” where critical thinking skills decline due to dependence on AI, as examples of damage.

At the same time, he emphasized the need to provide strong age verification measures to block children's access to chatbots and the option to turn off AI answers that are automatically displayed in search engines.

He then explained that he plans to establish a public standard to measure AI risks, similar to car crash tests.

In response to a request for comment on Segal's remarks, a Google spokesperson explained, "Our AI search is useful for children and teenagers to explore information," and responded that Open AI is also identifying users under the age of use through various behavioral analysis.

Director Siegel worked at Google from 2004 to 2019 and was in charge of strengthening platform safety, but he left after feeling his limitations and co-founded and led Trust Lab, a startup that detects harmful AI elements.

OpenAI's parent organizations, the OpenAI Foundation and Antropic, are sponsoring the Youth AI Safety Research Institute.