Using AI safely and wisely
AI tools can help you learn, but you need to protect your privacy, check facts and do your own work. AI can make things up, so reliable sources and a trusted adult help you stay safe.
📌 Key points
- Protect your privacy: never type your full name, address, school, phone number, passwords or photos of yourself into an AI tool.
- AI can make things up: it may give facts, quotes or sources that sound real but are false. This is often called a "hallucination".
- Check facts in reliable sources, such as a school book, a trusted website or your teacher.
- Getting AI to do your homework and handing it in as your own work is cheating. You also miss the chance to learn.
- If your teacher allows it, use AI to help you learn, for example to explain an idea in a different way or to quiz you. Then do the work yourself.
- Many AI tools have age limits. Only use AI with a parent's or teacher's permission.
- Some pictures, videos and voices are made by AI and can look or sound real. Think before you believe or share them.
- AI is a computer program, not a friend. If something an AI says worries or upsets you, stop and tell a trusted adult.
📖 Key words
- Privacy
- Keeping your personal information safe and to yourself.
- Personal information
- Details about you, such as your name, address, school, phone number or photos.
- Reliable source
- A source you can trust, such as a school book, a trusted website or your teacher.
- Hallucination
- When an AI makes up information that sounds true but is false.
- Plagiarism
- Copying someone else's work, or an AI's work, and saying it is your own.
✏️ Worked example
Omar asks a chatbot for facts for his science project. It says, "The Moon is 1,000 km from Earth." What should he do?
- The answer sounds confident, but chatbots can make things up.
- He checks a reliable source: his science book says the Moon is about 384,000 km from Earth.
- So the chatbot was wrong. He uses the fact from the book.
- He writes the project in his own words, and he does not type his name or school into the chatbot.
- Answer: check important facts in reliable sources, do the work yourself, and keep personal information private.
Remember three words: Private, Check, Own. Keep personal information private, check the facts, and make the work your own.
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