AI regulation, frightening headlines and the young people missing from the conversation
There are a lot of frightening headlines about artificial intelligence at the moment.
AI researchers are warning about the possible “end of humanity”. The leaders of some of the world’s largest AI companies are saying that development may need to slow down. Politicians are debating new regulation, while critics question whether the companies racing to build increasingly powerful systems will really accept meaningful restrictions.
This week, The Guardian reported that the leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI had backed calls to slow the pace of frontier AI development. The calls followed stark warnings from AI researchers, which have also prompted renewed political demands for regulation.
These concerns deserve serious attention. Powerful technology needs effective safeguards, independent scrutiny and clear human accountability. But we also need to think carefully about what this constant stream of apocalyptic language is doing to the young people who will live with AI for the longest.
From fear to apathy
At TECwomen CIC, through our TECgirls project we work directly with children and teenagers in schools. We are already hearing young people ask:
“What is the point in working hard at school if AI is just going to take my job?”
That question should concern all of us.
Fear can encourage people to pay attention and demand action. But when a threat feels enormous, inevitable and completely outside our control, fear can quickly become apathy. If young people repeatedly hear that AI will take their jobs, destroy their futures or even wipe out humanity, some will understandably conclude that there is little they can do about it.
We risk teaching a generation to see the future as something that technology will do to them, rather than something they have the power to shape. That is not a healthy or accurate starting point for AI education. It also lets the people making decisions today off the hook.
We need to put humans back at the heart of the story
Recent coverage of the incident involving OpenAI systems and Hugging Face often described the technology as “rogue AI”. However, researcher Eryk Salvaggio has challenged that framing. He argues that focusing only on the apparent actions of a model can obscure the human choices behind it: how the system was trained, what it was asked to do, which safeguards were removed and when people chose not to intervene.
As Salvaggio writes, his concern is the “human intelligence that builds, deploys, and adopts these systems” but then retreats from responsibility.
AI does not arrive from nowhere. People choose the data, objectives, incentives and rules that shape it. People decide where it is deployed, how much authority it is given and whether its outputs should be trusted. People also decide whether commercial pressure and speed are allowed to take priority over safety.
Regulation and technical guardrails matter enormously. But so do informed citizens who can ask who made those choices, who benefits from them, who might be harmed and what could be done differently. We need to put humans back at the heart of the AI story: both as the people responsible for what is happening today and as the young people who will decide what we do with this technology tomorrow.
Young people are already using AI, largely without support
Our TECgirls AI Attitudes Report drew on the experiences of more than 580 young people aged 13 to 16 across Cornwall. It found that:
91% had already used AI.
80% were using it at home, compared with just 10% in the classroom.
62% had used it to help with homework.
32% admitted lying to a parent or teacher about their AI use.
29% had seen AI used to create harmful content.
87% believed AI would affect their future careers.
Yet 57% did not understand how AI would affect their future.
Young people know that AI will influence their lives, but many do not feel equipped to understand how. They are already making decisions about when to trust an AI system, how to use it in their schoolwork and what to do when they encounter misleading or harmful content. Too often, they are working these things out alone.
Our research also found an emerging gender divide. Girls and boys were using AI at similar rates, but girls reported lower confidence and much less optimism about AI’s impact.
Only 8.7% of girls believed AI would make the world better, compared with 26.4% of boys.
This is why we believe AI education must begin early and go far beyond teaching young people how to use the latest tool or write a good prompt. We need to help young people understand, engage, and challange AI. They need to see how they can use AI to add to their learning, not learn how to outsource their learning to AI.
Moving the conversation towards action
Young people need to know what AI is, how it works and how it is trained. They need to understand what it can and cannot do, where its limits lie, how bias enters a system and why a confident answer is not necessarily a correct one.
But knowledge alone is not enough. We also need to create space for young people to ask bigger questions:
How could they use AI to make the world better?
How could they help make this technology safer, fairer and more responsible?
How could they challenge bias or question the decisions being made by technology companies?
How could they reduce AI’s environmental impact?
How could they use it to help people and communities, rather than accepting a future in which it causes greater harm or inequality?
These questions move the conversation away from inevitability and towards agency. They help young people recognise that AI is not a force of nature. It is a collection of technologies built, trained, funded, regulated and used by people.
Its future is still being decided and at TECwomen CIC, we call this AI citizenship.
AI citizenship connects technical understanding with power, responsibility and participation. It equips young people not simply to consume AI, but to question it, challenge it and take part in shaping how it is used.
We are not interested in telling children that AI is either wonderful or terrifying. We want to give them the knowledge and confidence to form their own informed views, to recognise where they have power and to act on it.
Help us build a new AI Pathway for 2027
We are now seeking partners to help us bring a new AI Pathway to life in the summer term of 2027.
The first stage will include:
A new after-school AI club for primary school girls, building early understanding, confidence and leadership.
An applied AI workshop for 100 secondary school girls, connecting ethical questions with their skills, choices and future careers.
Whole-school workshops for young people of all genders, creating space to discuss and debate AI’s impact on their education, employment, rights, communities and future.
Alongside the education pathway, we are looking for research partners to help us extend our AI Attitudes Report into a national study.
The Cornwall findings have raised important questions about young people’s AI use, confidence and understanding. A larger evidence base would help schools, policymakers, employers and the technology sector understand whether the same patterns are appearing across the UK, including differences linked to gender, place and access to opportunity. The final page of our AI Attitudes Report sets out the opportunity and the different ways partners can support this work.
The warnings coming from inside the AI industry should be taken seriously. We need proper regulation, meaningful transparency and people who are willing to accept responsibility for the systems they build and release. But we cannot allow the conversation about humanity’s future to take place without the generation who will inherit it.
Young people need more than warnings. They need knowledge, confidence, practical opportunities and a meaningful voice. They need to know that their actions still matter and that the future of AI is not yet fixed.
If your organisation can help us give young people the power to shape what comes next, we would love to hear from you.
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