About this Event
Speaker: Dr. Charlotte Rose Kennedy
Abstract: AI chatbots exhibit anthropomorphic traits and generate human-like responses that increase the risk of emotional and social dependency. This presents a safeguarding challenge: AI chatbots are not designed with children’s emotional vulnerabilities in mind (Kurian 2025) and can therefore expose children to harmful content (Internet Matters 2025).UK schools are required to implement ‘filtering and monitoring software’ on devices to protect children from online harms. Senso.cloud, a leading filtering and monitoring software, uses ‘keyword monitoring’ to identify words and phrases that signal safeguarding concerns so schools can identify at-risk students and quickly intervene (McGlashan and Kennedy 2025).This Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study (Partington et al. 2013) analyses a 284,833-word corpus of posts and comments from the subreddit r/character_ai_recovery, a forum for users trying to quit AI chatbots. In doing so, it identifies words and phrases associated with AI chatbot dependency and related dangerous behaviours to enhance Senso.cloud’s detection of this emerging safeguarding concern.Findings reveal that users primarily turn to chatbots to satisfy unmet social and emotional needs, leading to an overreliance that produces adverse social and emotional effects such as loneliness, shame, and cognitive decline. The keywords identified have been incorporated into Senso.cloud’s filtering and monitoring system to better enable schools to provide timely support to at-risk students, potentially preventing harmful dependency on AI chatbots.
Internet Matters. (2025). Me, Myself and AI: Understanding and safeguarding children’s use of AI chatbots.
Kurian, N. (2025). ‘No, Alexa, no!’: designing child-safe AI and protecting children from the risks of the ‘empathy gap’ in largelanguage models. Learning, Media and Technology. 1-14.
McGlashan, M. and Kennedy, C. R. (2025). Corpus linguistics for safeguarding children online. Applied Corpus Linguistics. 5(3): 1-9.
Partington, A., Duguid, A. and Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse: theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Event venue & nearby stays
Aston University, Main Building, room NW915, Aston Street, Birmingham, United Kingdom
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