#248 - How AI Has Changed the Risks of Sharing Children's Images

Now, for many years, we know that early years settings have shared lots of photos of children playing, learning, celebrating those special events and their special moments, and I understand why.

I mean, years ago, that would've been the same with my own children and, you know, we wanna show parents what's happening in the setting through social media because that's the way that we do it.

We want to celebrate all those experiences that children are having.

We want to be able to promote our early years setting, our preschools, our child minding settings.

We want people to see happy families, engaging environments, and the interactive, uh, practitioners.

But this is where I want to share this podcast with you because social media has changed, and technology has changed, and this is where AI, artificial intelligence, has changed, and we're seeing more and more use, more of how AI is changing the way things are being used.

Some of the risks connected to sharing children's images online have changed too, and it's extremely sad, but it's changed, and we have to be reactive to it.

So the reason for this podcast is that maybe your practice needs to change, too, and I want you to seriously think about what you're doing.

Once you put a photograph online, we lose control of it.

One of the biggest concerns is that once an image is placed online, we can't fully control what's happened to it.

Someone can save it.

Someone can screenshot it, and we know that happens.

They can also share it, copy it to another platform, and this is where AI comes into play.

Someone can use AI to manipulate that photo, and that's something that's really sad and scary, and one of those perfectly innocent photographs that we take can be altered.

And you might think, "Oh, God.

Here she goes, Vanessa." Well, actually, it really got us thinking.

A child's face can be placed onto another image.

Photographs can be changed, enhanced, or used to create completely false contests, images, context.

Um, images of children can be manipulated into sexual and abusive material.

Now, I know this is deeply uncomfortable to talk about, and I know many of you are using children's faces on social media, Facebook, and your website, but it got us thinking, and we can't avoid those conversations.

We have to embrace them and start asking ourselves, what are we doing? Now, if there is a potential risk to children, we have a responsibility to understand it and respond to it.

So consent does not remove the risk, and many settings will say, "Well, we get parents to consent.

They sign a parental consent form." And we understand that, but it's really important that we focus on what people can actually do with those images, and this is something that we made a stand on at Jigsaw and Impact.

So we as an, as a business, we made a decision that we're not going to use children's faces on any of our social media.

You won't see children's faces on our Facebook page, our website, or anything else we share content.