2025.Aug.15

REPORTS

Report on the 2nd BAIRAL Research Meeting for Fiscal Year 2025
“AI Society Seen through Childhood Studies”

On July 30, 2025, the second BAIRAL Research Meeting of the academic year was held. On this occasion, we invited Dr. Xiao ZHOU, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba, to deliver a lecture entitled “AI Society through the Lens of Childhood Studies.”

Dr. ZHOU examined the notion of “responsibility” in an AI society from the distinctive perspective of children’s developmental stages and childhood studies. Having conducted research across a wide range of fields—including the sociology of crime, sociology of law, and studies on minors—Dr. ZHOU focuses on the emerging challenges of AI and responsibility in the digital age. In this lecture, Dr. ZHOU problematized the blurred boundary between the real and the virtual as a new issue in the digital era, argued for the need to redefine “responsibility” in AI society, explored the parallels between “children” and AI, and proposed a new working hypothesis. Building on the trajectory from research on “children” to childhood studies, Dr. ZHOU also reflected on what insights childhood studies might offer for the future of AI society.

According to Dr. ZHOU, legal challenges in the digital age include the escalation of new issues brought about by AI technologies—such as violations of portrait rights and reputational harm through deepfakes, fraud, and sexual violence in virtual spaces. Current laws and platform regulations remain insufficient to address these issues, particularly as sexual crimes in virtual environments often fail to constitute criminal offenses. At present, AI is regarded as a “tool” without independent will or cognitive capacity, and thus cannot be a legal or moral bearer of responsibility. Consequently, liability for AI-related harms is assigned to humans—engineers, users, and manufacturers.

The lecture advanced the hypothesis that the evolution of AI from “weak AI” (task-specific intelligence) to “strong AI” (general intelligence) parallels the developmental process through which a child matures from an immature state to intellectual maturity. From this analogy, Dr. ZHOU suggested that the perspective of childhood studies—which regards children not merely as passive recipients of protection but as active agents and socially constructed beings—offers a valuable framework for rethinking responsibility and agency in the future AI society.

Particularly, “posthuman childhood studies” conceptualizes agency as emerging within a web of interrelations in which human and nonhuman entities are not strictly separated. Applying this view to AI opens the possibility of conceiving AI not merely as an “entity subject to responsibility” but as a “responsible being” embedded in the deep interconnections among humans, nonhumans, environments, and technologies. This perspective further allows for recognizing AI’s agency in nonverbal expressions such as gestures, movements, and sounds.

In conclusion, Dr. ZHOU’s lecture underscored the need to move beyond conventional anthropocentric understandings and to reconstruct the concept of “responsibility” in a more inclusive and relational manner, in order to address the ethical and legal challenges emerging as AI becomes ever more integrated into society.