Why wait?

AI “nudify” tools can generate fake intimate imagery from an ordinary clothed photo in seconds. The technology is cheap, easy to use, and widely available. Primary and secondary school children — girls in particular — have been targeted in incidents reported across Ireland, the UK, and elsewhere.

Once an image is created, it spreads through group chats and social platforms quickly. Removing it fully is often impossible, and the harm to the child depicted is real regardless of whether the image is technically fake. Perpetrators are frequently other children, not strangers.

Products that simulate friendship, romance, or a listening ear — character AI apps, in-app chatbots, companion apps — are marketed to teens and often accessed by younger children. Age gates are typically self-declared.

Recorded harms include unsafe advice on self-harm, eating disorders, and mental health; sexualised roleplay involving minors; and emotional dependency that displaces real friendships. Safeguards for children exist unevenly and continue to lag behind the products.

Contact with strangers happens most often through games, direct messages, and social platforms — rarely through the channels parents worry about most. Sextortion follows a common pattern: build rapport, obtain an image, then threaten to share it unless the child pays or sends more.

Financial sextortion aimed at teenage boys has been rising, with incidents escalating from first contact to acute crisis within days. Gardaí and international law enforcement have flagged this as one of the fastest-growing online harms to minors.

The difference between a smartphone and older forms of contact is that there is no off. Group chats run through the night. Being excluded is visible in a way it wasn’t before. Screenshots and repost culture make single incidents permanent.

For primary-age children, the social skills to manage this are still forming. Many parents choose to wait until those skills are more robust, rather than asking a young child to navigate adult-scale social systems.

Recommendation feeds are tuned for engagement, not age-appropriateness. Content on self-harm, extreme dieting, misogynistic influencers, gambling promotion, and graphic violence surfaces easily — sometimes within a handful of taps from a neutral starting point.

The feed personalises quickly. A child who lingers on one video is shown more of the same. Parental controls help but do not solve this: the systems are designed to hold attention, and children are the most susceptible audience.

Late-night phone use during years of rapid brain development affects sleep architecture, mood regulation, and next-day attention. Constant notifications fragment focus in ways that show up in school work and family life.

The research linking smartphone and social media use to rising anxiety and depression rates in adolescents is contested in its details, but the direction of the signal is consistent. Waiting a few years costs little and preserves options.