As AI becomes more and more prevalent in children’s lives, the conversation about their safety online is rightly moving quickly.

There are urgent issues around harmful content, privacy, emotional dependence and AI-generated abuse - to name just a few. These questions are critically important and SAIFCA will continue to address and confront them.

But there is also another dimension connected to these issues, which deserves attention - the question of what we do want for children’s safety and wellbeing, as well as what we know we do not want.

The question at the heart of Keep Childhood Human, a new SAIFCA campaign launching soon, is:

What parts of childhood must remain fully human?

The campaign will focus on the aspects of childhood that should not become AI-mediated, and on the idea that AI should not stand between children and the human experiences they need in order to grow and thrive.

Those experiences include real relationships, creative effort, independent thought, boredom, play, silliness, trusted adults, disagreement, mistakes, friendships with real children and real-world experience.

SAIFCA has never been an ‘anti-AI’ organisation. We recognise the potential of AI in many areas, such as healthcare. But we also believe that children’s safety and development are at risk if AI becomes normalised as a substitute for the real experiences through which children grow.

Over recent months, SAIFCA has been gathering input from leading developmental psychologists, child safety professionals and others from around the world to help shape the campaign before launch. We’re very grateful to everyone who has contributed their expertise, insight and time.

The campaign will explore how children’s human development can be protected in an age of increasingly persuasive, personalised and always-available AI systems - including ones that imitate friendship, emotional support and creativity.

We will be sharing more about the campaign in the coming weeks and months. For now, we are setting out the principle at its heart:

AI should not replace the human experiences through which childhood itself is formed.

Children do not only need active protection from harm. They also need space for the real relationships, experiences, challenges, mistakes, creativity, play and ordinary human moments that help them grow.

Through Keep Childhood Human, we want to help protect that space.