University of Washington shelves plan to record preschoolers for AI training after parent revolt

Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

University of Washington researchers planned to have preschool teachers wear cameras that would record everything they saw from a first-person perspective, including the children they were teaching, then use that footage to develop AI models. Crucially, the program was presented as opt-out, rather than opt-in, meaning that parents had to take steps to prevent recordings of their children being processed by AI. "With your permission, your child's lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher's approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom," a document given to parents and later shared with 404 Media reads. "These videos simply capture the normal interactions between teachers and children during regular classroom activities. Recordings occur during morning program hours up to 150 minutes, up to 4 visits in one month. Your child will not be asked to do anything new or different. Their daily routine will stay exactly the same." 404 Media has repeatedly covered how AI is permeating through education. That includes students using AI themselves, and even the creation of entire AI-powered schools. Now, the University of Washington research shows how AI data collection is pushing into early childhood education too. Or, it would have, if parents didn't revolt. After a backlash, the University of Washington told 404 Media it has now shelved the planned research. "The goal of this study is to better understand children's everyday learning experiences and to develop Al tools that can help assess classroom interaction quality," the document says. The research was being led by Dr. Gail Joseph and the Cultivate Learning team at the University of Washington, it says. Joseph's work focuses on early childhood education. The document says that this collected footage would have been used to "develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality." That includes human reviewers watching and annotating the videos, with that data then improving AI models. "AI tools will also analyze the same recordings to generate codes and justifications," the document reads. The document doesn't name any specific AI providers, but says, "Video data may be processed using cloud-based AI services." Only the research teams would have used the annotated videos to train "secure, private AI models." Teachers were to be given a "written observation summary," it adds. The researchers say the footage and audio may have been used in academic papers or for conferences, but the researchers planned to blur faces and edit out names "whenever possible." Finally, the collected footage and data may be shared with others "to support future early childhood education research," the document says. A parent who received the document said they were "taken aback" after reading it. "I am troubled by the idea of using my child's likeness in unknown AI tools and how this could be abused," she added. "I was particularly concerned about families' ability to give informed consent. As a native English speaker, the vague language in the handout left me with a slew of questions. Many families in our school are migrants and non-native English speakers, but forms were not provided in any of their native languages." 404 Media granted the parent anonymity to avoid repercussions. 404 Media sent sections of the document to multiple experts in education and AI. "The excerpt doesn't provide important information, and those omissions concern me (assuming they're not provided in another part of the letter I haven't seen). Who may the data may be shared with? How long will it be maintained? Who is funding the research? Those are questions that I would want answers to, and the answers could exist," Faith Boninger, co-director of the National Education Policy Center, told 404 Media. "A big question that doesn't have an answer relates to the language that describes the purposes for which the videos may be used. The wording 'not limited to' implies that there could be any number of future uses to which the data may be put that haven't even been thought of yet." "I am always hopeful we will continue to find ways to improve support for teachers and students. While I don't know the details of this specific study, from what you shared, I am glad to see research that includes humans in the loop and clear disclosure of data collection and use," Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, told 404 Media. "That said, anytime we bring cameras and AI into the classroom, protecting student and teacher data must be the highest priority. Rigorous research with transparent publication of results is how we will learn what actually helps educators in the classroom." The document presents participation in the research as "completely voluntary." But it is not an opt-in model. Instead, parents have to opt-out if they don't want their children to be recorded by a teacher-worn camera and have that footage processed by AI. "You may decline or withdraw your child from the research at any time. Your decision will not affect your child's enrollment or standing in the program," it says. That raised questions around how that would practically work. If one parent opted their child out, would only they be omitted from any footage? Jackson Holtz, assistant director of University of Washington News, told 404 Media in an email that if a parent did opt-out, that entire class would be removed from the research. "The consent process was designed so that not only could families opt out, if even a single family decided to opt out, their entire classroom would be excluded," he wrote. The parent said, "Only through questioning teachers and school administrators did we learn the researchers would put stickers on children who opted out, but no further information was provided on whether they would still be filmed." "Our initial outreach was intended to help us better understand how families would feel about a project that uses artificial intelligence to support teachers," Holtz continued. Holtz said after that feedback, the University of Washington has stopped the research. "Given the early responses from parents, we have terminated the study and are no longer seeking participation at any site. (It is not unusual to terminate a study in the early stages as we receive feedback from community partners.) All programs are in the process of being notified that this particular study is now terminated," he wrote. After 404 Media contacted the university for comment, the section of its website describing the study was taken offline.

Plan For Teachers to Record Children For AI Training Purposes Scrapped After Parent Backlash

A controversial research project led by the University of Washington that would have seen teachers wearing cameras in the classroom has been scrapped after parents expressed outrage. As 404 Media reports, the program presented to the parents of children was opt-out rather than opt-in. Researchers wanted to fix a camera on teachers to record a first-person-view. A document given to parents says that the videos would capture the "normal interaction between teachers and children during regular classroom activities." While the goal of the study was to ostensibly "better understand children's everyday learning experiences and to develop AI tools that can help assess classroom interaction quality," parents immediately raised concerns. "I am troubled by the idea of using my child's likeness in unknown AI tools and how this could be abused," says one parent, per 404 Media. Despite the document that was presented to parents stating that the videos would be used to train "secure, private AI models," it made no mention of which models. This omission alarmed the experts that 404 Media spoke to. "Who may the data may be shared with? How long will it be maintained? Who is funding the research? Those are questions that I would want answers to," says Faith Boninger, co-director of the National Education Policy Center, who also took issue with the wording "not limited to," which implies that the data could be used in the future in unforeseen ways. Tech companies like to include such wording in contracts; it's what tripped up the founder of an image archive called Diversity Photos after he signed up with Adobe on a stock image licensing deal, but his photos wound up being used to train Adobe's Firefly AI image model -- leading to a legal dispute. After parents raised concerns over the University of Washington's AI research project, it was shelved. "Our initial outreach was intended to help us better understand how families would feel about a project that uses artificial intelligence to support teachers," assistant director of University of Washington News Jackson Holts tells 404 Media. "Given the early responses from parents, we have terminated the study and are no longer seeking participation at any site. (It is not unusual to terminate a study in the early stages as we receive feedback from community partners.) All programs are in the process of being notified that this particular study is now terminated."

Parents Explode in Fury at School's Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A planned University of Washington study would've had preschool teachers wear cameras to record first-person footage of everything in the classroom, including the young children they were instructing, and use that footage to train AI models. If a parent was uncomfortable with all that, they had to manually opt-out -- meaning that unless the researchers were given a formal no, a parent's child would've been automatically opted into the experiment. "With your permission, your child's lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher's approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom," reads a document given to parents and obtained by 404 Media in a new investigative piece. "These videos simply capture the normal interactions between teachers and children during regular classroom activities." The parents did a little more than opt out, however. They revolted, and the backlash was so heated that the University of Washington called off the experiment entirely, according to 404. The documents given to parents sometimes used nebulous language and left key questions open-ended. They stated that the footage would've been used to "develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality," and that the "video data may be processed using cloud-based AI services." But they didn't specify what AI models or what AI companies would be involved. Thorny questions abounded. What about the parent of a child who didn't give consent? Would only they be blurred out in the footage? How would that realistically work? The documents only said the researchers would censor faces and names "whenever possible," but that meant your child was still being filmed. These looming uncertainties rattled parents. "I am troubled by the idea of using my child's likeness in unknown AI tools and how this could be abused," one parent who chose to remain anonymous told 404. "I was particularly concerned about families' ability to give informed consent," she added. "As a native English speaker, the vague language in the handout left me with a slew of questions. Many families in our school are migrants and non-native English speakers, but forms were not provided in any of their native languages." Experts in education were also raising eyebrows at the document's language. "Who may the data may be shared with? How long will it be maintained? Who is funding the research? Those are questions that I would want answers to, and the answers could exist," Faith Boninger, co-director of the National Education Policy Center, told 404. The University of Washington said it was putting the research on ice after parent backlash. "Given the early responses from parents, we have terminated the study and are no longer seeking participation at any site," a spokesperson told 404, noting that it's "not unusual to terminate a study in the early stages as we receive feedback from community partners." The cancelled study marks the latest evolutionary stage of AI's inroads into education. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are pouring millions of dollars into teacher's unions and providing training on how to use their AI tools. Universities are partnering with AI companies to give students free access to AI, in what essentially amounts to putting a rubber stamp on how students are already dependent on AI to write essays and complete assignments -- or, in other words, cheating. Now, with that massive drive to inject AI into the classroom, there's apparently a consequent demand to gather data to fuel building specialized models. Its demise is also an example of how parents have been spearheading the mounting AI backlash. A planned AI-powered high school in New York was cancelled, for instance, after more moms and dads protested outside City Hall last month.