Mayo mother rings alarm on "AI bullying" in schools

A Mayo parent, who wishes to remain anonymous. has stated: “I want to raise awareness about some of the negative impact this new wave of AI apps is having in our schools.”

She elaborated: “In the beginning, ChatGPT was mostly fine, it seemed to impact homework a bit but teachers started using AI checkers and switched to more in-person testing and seem to have the situation handled.”

But this next wave of AI apps seems far more dangerous and I'd like to see them age-restricted or banned.

She continues by using an application, "looksrater" as an example of a site that ran through her children’s school causing massive issues with bullying and exclusion.

On this site, you can submit a picture of you or anyone else and it'll use AI to rate every aspect of your appearance out of 10 while going into detail on your faults.

She remarked: “It's horrible. If you thought Instagram was doing damage to your kid's self-image and self-esteem you should see the effect this has.

“My child was crying because some of the boys in her class put her on the app and shared their score. It's just awful.”

The kids have a list of their scores ranked. Even if a kid doesn't want to use the website they'll just take a photo from their social media. In some cases, they'll take pictures of other kids themselves.

Due to this app and the growing use of AI generators, she said: “The number of bullying issues has sky-rocketed in schools.”

Teachers are seemingly at a loss to deal with this issue according to this mother, “because even if they banned phones the kids would just use them outside of school uploading each other's social media pictures.”