The emergence of generative AI in the professional and domestic sphere was one of the biggest developments of 2023 and children have not been left out of this phenomenon. In Spain, at least one in five minors between 4 and 18 years old accessed ChatGPT last year, and the OpenAI website was the 18th most visited by this population group, according to data collected by Qustodio, the security platform. online for families.
However, the majority of kids are still exploring the uses of artificial intelligence tools and the time they spend using ChatGPT is still moderate: about six minutes a day in the case of Spain.
The main use that children and adolescents make of screens – compared to which they spend an average of four hours a day outside the classroom, that is, during their free time – is watching videos on YouTube or social networks. In fact, Spain is the country – of the five analyzed by Qustodio’s study – where minors spend the most time on social networks. And TikTok is the favorite: they dedicate, on average, 94 minutes a day to it, which is two less than in the 2022 study but represents almost 24 days a year!
And the time of use of the rest of the platforms grows. Instagram does so by 27% and consolidates itself as the second most used social network by children and adolescents, with 71 minutes of daily consumption. Behind are Facebook (23 minutes a day), X (11), Pinterest (10) and BeReal (9).
The time that Spanish minors spend watching online videos on platforms such as YouTube or Twitch has also increased. In the first they spend an average of 44 minutes each day, during non-school hours
On the contrary, there is a loss of popularity of video games – in which less and less leisure time is invested – and of online educational tools, whose use skyrocketed with the pandemic.
Eduardo Cruz, CEO and co-founder of Qustodio, has emphasized the need for parents to be aware that children live their lives, culture and relationships mainly digitally, that it is not about scaring them or preventing their access, but rather to know the use they make and the trends that exist, help them understand the differences between the real world and the digital one, educate them in responsible digitalization and so that they behave in a positive and friendly way on social networks, establish daily limits of use and block inappropriate applications or content.
The Qustodio report on the digital habits of minors, which analyzes information from 400,000 families with children between 4 and 18 years old in Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and the results of 950 personal interviews about the problems that causes the use of screens at home, confirms that exposure to adult content and addiction are the main concerns of parents regarding their children’s digital consumption.
But the fact that access to pornography by minors is one of the main concerns of families does not justify, according to Cruz, the introduction of a digital identity verification system like the one proposed by the Government of Pedro Sánchez.
“We are facing a specific problem of control of minors and there is talk of giving a kind of Internet driving license to everyone, and that affects freedoms, because if you identify digital tastes and accesses without any counterweight you will be creating a database that can be misused in the future, which can be used for censorship purposes, to identify people who are favorable or opposed to certain things,” stated the Qustodio manager during the presentation of the study, which is also not supporter of a general ban on cell phones in schools.
