I worry about how my child will be affected by AI assistants. I'm teaching her how to fact-check their answers.

• AI voice assistants are changing the way we speak and interact with the world.
• I worry about how exposure to these will affect my child's communication skills as she gets older.

My daughter is only a year old and already she is accustomed to the stilted tones of the Alexa in my mom's kitchen. She looks around with interest when we use it to set a timer or check the weather forecast. But how will growing up alongside AI voice assistants change the way she learns how to interact with the world?

It's natural to question the effect of new technology on developing brains. I have concerns about how AI voice assistants could make it harder for kids to converse with real people, how they can blur the lines between fact and fiction, and the ramifications for data security, and it seems I'm not alone. Insider spoke with experts about their thoughts on kids' use of AI voice assistants.

Moral, social, and linguistic development

As they begin to figure out the world around them, young children are drawn to asking questions. "As kids, the information-seeking part of us is probably the most powerful skill that we possess," Fiona Yassin, a family psychotherapist and the founder and clinical director of The Wave Clinic, told Insider. But using AI-powered assistants is changing the way that we communicate, and this change is likely to alter children's learning patterns.

As parents or teachers, "when we're asked something, we can give an answer that's both age-appropriate and fits our area of culture or ethics," Yassin said. "You don't get that when it comes from Alexa."

When my daughter starts to ask things about topics that may need to be handled sensitively, like sex and relationships, drugs and alcohol, or body image and diet (which are also topics that kids or young teens may shy away from broaching with their parents), I want to be able to open an age-appropriate, ethical discussion.

When using AI voice assistants around kids, it's important to "have curiosity and participate with your children when it comes to asking and answering questions," Kelley Yost Abrams, a child-development psychologist and a member of BabyCenter's medical advisory board, said. Continue to talk to kids about the responses they get, ask them whether the information is credible, and how they can double-check it.

For younger kids, this could be as simple as pointing out: "That was a funny answer," or suggesting: "Should we ask this question? I wonder what we'll get in response."

Alex Postbechild, an ethical hacker at JISC, the UK's digital, data, and technology agency, and the author of two children's books about cybersecurity, prompts his own child to think critically. "It's giving you an answer because it wants to give you an answer, and it has to give you an answer if it can, but are you asking the right question?" he said. "Stop and think about what it is you want an answer for, and make sure you get two sides of the story."

Being able to weigh the benefits and limitations of information is a skill that needs to be developed and practiced like any other, Yassin told Insider. "The more we rely on external direct answers that are then going to be transcribed or absorbed as being correct, the less ability that our young people have to be able to critically analyze — that's essential for just about everything in life," she said.

Robots versus humans

AI voice assistants are designed to speak like a human.

Jennifer Chubb, a research fellow at the University of York in the UK, has looked at much of the existing research on children's interactions with Conversational AI and has concerns about moral, social, and linguistic development; privacy; parental permissions and control; and the need for regulation.

Children are forming their views on how to interact with humans based on how they interact with technology, Chubb said. Exchanges with AI voice assistants might lead children to expect an immediate response to questions or to make commands ("Alexa, turn the lights on") instead of requests.

Some kids consider those devices more like friends, and they may have developed a rapport with the AI voice assistant. "And so what happens when that Alexa breaks?" Chubb asked.

Yost Abrams said that for very young children (under about 5 years old), "the distinction between reality and imaginary is seamless." Lots of young kids believe there are tiny people inside their TV screens, and this isn't so different. "It's OK if children have fun with it," she added, as long as we talk to them about it in an age-appropriate way so they understand that it's not human.

In my own young family, I refer to devices we interact with at other people's houses as "The Alexa" not just "Alexa." It's a small distinction, but it makes it clear that the device is an object. You might say to a young child, "Let's ask the computer," but you wouldn't say "Let's ask the Grandma."

Privacy, security, and parental controls

"We don't know quite how our data is being used," Chubb said, but "we certainly do know that it is being mined and driving our behaviors and our preferences."

Chubb is an advocate for prompting kids to consider what and how they share their feelings, their thoughts, and their personal information. "Allow the child to understand that in the same way that their words can be powerful in the real world, they can be powerful in the digital world as well, that they have ownership over their own voice," she said.

Many AI researchers and scholars, Chubb said, are rejecting AI — and Alexa in particular, which is Amazon's AI assistant — on privacy grounds. This certainly rings true for Postbechild, the ethical hacker.

He told Insider about one recent attack: Alexa versus Alexa, in which hackers are able to access the target device using a second device. Once they've compromised the target device, they can start issuing and running commands. Hackers can change things and substitute facts and responses — they can make two plus two equal five.

"How can you be certain that kids are getting the information that they want to be getting or need to be getting through the device?" Postbechild asked.

This specific hack has been fixed, but anyone who doesn't regularly update their devices could be vulnerable to similar attacks.

And while both Alexa and Google Assistant have parental-control features available in their settings, a quick anecdotal poll of two dozen of my own parent friends revealed that very few of us even knew that was an option.

Angela Moscaritolo, PC Magazine's senior consumer-electronics analyst, said that Amazon Kids allows parents to set daily time limits, filter content, and review activity. "If your kid gets into trouble and is grounded from technology, you can easily pause their Echo device via the Parent Dashboard," she said.

She told Insider that the parental controls offered by Google are similar, "including the ability to block explicit music and video content from YouTube and other streaming services and set time limits."

Additionally, Moscaritolo said that the Alexa Voice ID and Visual ID offer features that "let the virtual assistant recognize your child's voice and face, respectively, to offer an age-appropriate experience and responses. If you set up the Visual ID feature for your kid, for instance, the home screen of your Echo Show will switch to show kid-friendly content when it recognizes your child's face. The Google Assistant Voice Match and Face Match features work similarly."

But you still need to be careful, even with parental controls in place. Kids are growing up with this technology and are often much better at removing controls than we are at implementing them.

"AI is everywhere," Chubb said, "we can't necessarily escape it. Nor necessarily should we."

For my own family, I don't think we'll be getting an Alexa anytime soon, but I also know that my daughter will probably grow up in an AI-powered world, where voice assistants are the norm. I want to teach her to think critically about the questions she asks — and the answers she receives — from the voice assistants she does come into contact with through friends and family.

"Children are going to be the next developers of AI," Chubb said. "They need to understand its power. They need to understand the power structures around it so that they know that they're not completely in control of it. And only through doing that, can they then understand and interact with it in the best possible way."