Co-Opting AI: Kids explored how growing up in the age of AI is reshaping children’s experiences and considered questions around agency, creativity, participation, and digital rights.

Annabel Blake is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney researching children and AI, and a Principal Design Researcher at Canva. Over the past decade, they have worked in Google’s Creative Lab experimenting with emerging technologies, authored award-winning children’s books, and competed internationally on the Freestyle Skiing World Cup circuit. Annabel’s practice is grounded in taking play seriously. Shaped by backgrounds in psychology, design, and extreme sports, their research explores how young people engage in risky and experimental play with emerging technologies. They are particularly interested in how elevating youth voices can orient technology teams toward designing more playful, child-centred experiences.

Sonia Livingstone is a professor in the department of media and communications at  the London School of Economics and Political Science. Taking a comparative, critical and contextualized approach, her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. Much of Livingstone’s time is concerned with Children’s Rights in the Digital Age. Livingstone has published twenty books on media audiences, especially children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment, including The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age (New York University Press, with Julian Sefton-Green). Her new book is Parenting for a Digital Future: How hopes and fears about technology shape children’s lives (Oxford University Press), with Alicia Blum-Ross.

Ashleigh Greene Wade is associate professor of digital studies, jointly appointed in media studies and African American studies. Broadly speaking, her work traverses the fields of Black girlhood studies, digital and visual media studies, Black feminist theory, and digital humanities. Wade has a PhD in women’s and gender studies from Rutgers University and is an alumna of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Fellowship Program. Her work on digital Blackness appears in The Black Scholar, National Political Science Review, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Visual Arts Research, and Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. Wade’s forthcoming monograph, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice (Duke University Press), explores the role of Black girls’ digital practices in documenting and preserving everyday Black life.

The event was moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia.