'Social Media on Steroids.' Advocates for Children Call for Guardrails Around AI

“We are living through the greatest transformation that we have seen in our lifetimes, and likely for a significant time before that,” two-time Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told an audience at New York City’s flagship public library on Oct. 28, comparing the advent of artificial intelligence to the advent of nuclear weaponry in terms of the need for carefully thought out safety standards. “We're at a branch point,” he added. “What should the future really look like, what are we trying to protect and preserve?”Murthy was not alone in sounding the alarm. Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, the organizer of the conference, told the mostly supportive crowd that recent history had proved that the industry leaders or, as he called them “tech broligarchs,” could not be relied upon to create digital information systems that were safe or healthy for children. “We did not get out in front of social media in time,” he told the gathering. “This is the moment. AI is a bigger deal. It's basically social media on steroids.” New York’s governor Kathy Hochul seemed to underscore the point when she made an unscheduled stop at the daylong summit to announce new regulations around chatbots interactions with children. The bill was designed to ensure that AI agents do not impersonate humans or communicate in a way that suggests they have a relationship with a child. “It's happening so quickly,” said Hochul of the technological changes. “It's almost impossible for parents to know what's going on, for elected officials to stay ahead of it, and we certainly have learned the lesson that we can't count on the companies to put out products that are responsible and that put children first.”Specifically, the new law, which goes into effect in January, will ban chatbots from encouraging suicide, self-harm, secrecy, or isolation and from discouraging children to seek help from other humans. They will also be banned from engaging in sexually explicit interactions and restricted from using a child’s past personal or health information in later conversations.For the attendees and speakers at the summit, who ranged from Chelsea Clinton and Columbia law professor Tim Wu (onstage) to Uma Thurman (in the audience), the announcement was a good start, although many bemoaned the lack of federal regulation, around both AI and social media. “To this day, 2026, our federal government and Congress has still—nearly a quarter century after the advent of social media—failed to announce anything to protect our kids,” said Murthy, who is now chair of the advisory board of Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute, which studies, tests, and rates AI platforms for children. Panelists called for a range of protective and preventative remedies for what they described as the coming tsunami of AI, including requiring more data transparency from tech companies by enabling regulatory agencies and researchers to get more access to the information they’re holding, using consumer-protection laws to ensure that AI models have been rigorously tested for potential negative outcomes, adopting the European model of not allowing AI companies to deploy their platforms until they have proved they are safe, or even instituting criminal penalties for AI companies who unleash unsafe technologies. “As a former prosecutor, I can tell you one thing,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who earlier this month won a $25 billion judgment against Meta. “When you bring out handcuffs, suddenly everything changes.”Not all the issues around AI can be solved by the law, however. One concern is the socialization of very young children by AI, including via voice-activated assistants like Alexa or very agreeable AI-enabled toys. “What do kids start to learn to expect from social practice? Do they expect someone to always agree with them? Is it always easy? Is it always like a transaction?” asked Dana Suskind, an early-childhood expert and professor at the University of Chicago. Human relationships are a lot messier, she noted. “They're chaotic, and that sort of mess is where a lot of learning happens.” Parents, who were caught off-guard by the influence of social media and digital devices, need to be educated about AI and encouraged that their imperfect parenting, as well as other human interaction, is vastly more beneficial to children than an AI companion, she said.The summit also touched on the enormous implications AI is having on education and students’ ability to work and learn, when answers are in such ready supply. “MIT just did a report saying every assignment at MIT could be done by generative AI,” said John King, a former U.S. Secretary of Education and current chancellor of State University in New York. King is considering major changes to student assessment. “We have to make sure we are seeing the students do the work, and we have to make sure they're getting those foundational skills,” he said. “It literally means every faculty member reassessing what they assign and how they measure student learning.” And, as Clinton pointed out, this is an equity issue too. “We know that in families with less than $30,000 of household income, teenagers are three times more likely to either largely or entirely do their homework through artificial intelligence than those households with family incomes of $75,000 or more,” she said. At the same time, students need to be prepared to enter a workforce in which AI skills are not optional. For those who have mastered them, the future is very bright. “The people coming in learn much more rapidly because AI gives them more capacity than they've had before,” said Gene Sykes, chairman of global mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs of the banking giant’s new recruits. “So somebody, within a month, can be doing incredibly productive work.” If good education in AI is distributed unevenly, some graduates will be vastly better prepared for a career than others, further exacerbating wealth inequities.While there was little consensus on the immediate steps to take as AI arrives, there was no argument that it will be consequential for children, families, and generations to come. “As we go into this age of transformation,” Murthy noted, “the question forced upon us is the following: What aspects of human existence do we want to protect and preserve at all costs?”