Chatbots for children: China grapples with how to teach use and ethics of AI in schools

The growing use of artificial intelligence tools by Chinese schoolchildren has triggered a debate about how to guide pupils to use the technology while ensuring they do not lose critical thinking skills.

A survey conducted in one secondary school in northern China by Banyuetan, a biweekly magazine affiliated with the state news agency Xinhua, found that 40 per cent of the 700 or so respondents had used mainland chatbots such as DeepSeek, Doubao and Kimi for their winter break homework this year.

A total of 31 per cent of respondents used AI tools to understand the questions and help learn the subject, while 28 per cent said they used the tools for information gathering and compilation.

Most of the students who admitted AI use said they used the chatbots in Chinese language, mathematics, and English, according to the article published in the magazine on February 19.

The emergence of DeepSeek – a Chinese chatbot whose performance rivals that of products developed by Western tech giants, such as ChatGPT, while requiring a fraction of the computing power to run and train – has stirred an AI frenzy in mainland China.

In recent weeks, local governments and entrepreneurs scrambled to integrate DeepSeek in their operations. Major universities also rolled out courses to train their students on how to use the tool.

However, when it comes to primary and secondary education, educators and parents are still figuring out how to teach children to use the new technology ethically, and in a way that will not jeopardise the development of children’s cognitive skills. For example, a primary school in Beijing asked students to use AI to compose Lunar New Year greetings on spring couplets.

  

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