Mr Luke Charters

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler, especially given your distinguished background in tech and AI advocacy. May I share something that hon. Members will be pleased to hear? I am, in fact, the youngest parent in Parliament, and I am constantly thinking about the place that my young boys are set to grow up in. We expect that AI will form a core part of their lives, even in primary school, which is hard to imagine. The more I think about AI, however, the more I think that we should introduce it in the key stage 2 curriculum, alongside vital safeguards. After all, I was learning to use Google Search at around that age. What is different about using Gemini today? There are potential harms, such as the deeply tragic story of a young boy in the US who sadly took his own life, but AI can be a force for good. The more that children learn about AI, and about using it for activities such as homework and coursework, the more I believe we should not be punishing them for using it. Instead, in the future, we should allow students to use AI in some exams to test how they use their AI skills. I met students at Fulford school and York college in my constituency and their message was, “Don’t punish us for using AI when it’s going to become a key part of our employment in the future. Teach us to use it responsibly. Teach us to use it when we come to our employment.” If we do not make that shift now, we will face a productivity puzzle in the future. I will move on to the issue of physical illness. We have all been poorly; we have all picked up an iPhone. As hon. Members can tell, my greatest treasure is my kids, but when parents put their children’s symptoms into AI, they are putting a lot of trust in AI models. I urge the Government to work with the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS to make sure that AI chatbots and tools cite the NHS as a single source of truth, not health advice from outside this country. I will touch on mental health as well, because around a quarter of children now use AI chatbots for their mental health. We cannot pretend that people will not use AI as a tool for mental health support, and in particular, blokes out there might well use AI as a first port of call to unpack what they are going through. That should be welcome, but it comes with a great responsibility for the AI tools—Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and so on—to get things right. I urge the companies that make those tools to work with the Government and the charitable sector, including great charities such as Samaritans, to do that. We have to embrace AI. There are great opportunities, but there need to be safeguards and support. With that in mind, Britain can be a world leader in AI safety.