Growing risk of AI images
Norton vice-president of Asia-Pacific and father of two Mark Gorrie said many parents have done everything they can to teach their kids how to stay safe online.
“They’ve put the safeguards in place: ‘Don’t reply to messages from strangers.’ ‘Be suspicious if a profile picture looks off.’ ‘Question anything with clumsy wording,’” Gorrie said.
He said many parents have spent years building an instinct for spotting what’s wrong, but AI was taking that instinct away.
The study found 44% of parents were not confident their child could tell AI-generated content from the real thing.
“A harmless photo your child posted can be altered, passed on and turned into leverage,” Gorrie warned.
“On the platforms they use every day, a convincing fake can pose as someone they trust or an official account.
Among children playing chat-enabled games, 49% have chatted with a stranger.
He said the old giveaways for false content, such as clumsy grammar and grainy images, had gone.
The Norton insights report found 79% of parents felt their child was being exposed to inappropriate content on social media too early.
Sextortion and abuse
The report said criminals were increasingly using AI-generated photos or fake identities to gain a young person’s trust.
It said these fake images could also be used to manipulate children into sharing real images, which could then be used for financial sextortion.
Last year, New Zealand enforcement agencies received more than 20,000 reports of online child sexual exploitation and abuse linked to New Zealand from the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
This was a 29% jump from 2024.
Hidden risks of gaming
Parents identified TikTok (15%) as their top platform of concern, with Snapchat in second at 13%, but social media sites weren’t the only concern.
Parents were also worried about the gaming world. Of the children who played chat-enabled games, 49% have chatted with a stranger via voice or text.
“Social media gets the attention, but plenty of this is happening in the chat layer sitting on top of gaming,” Gorrie said.
He said many parents may perceive games as a place where kids are “just having fun”, so it was easy for caregivers to let their guard down.
Parents identified TikTok (15%) as their top platform of concern.
The report found 22% of parents whose children gamed said their child has received inappropriate or offensive messages.
Of even greater concern, 17% said their child had been encouraged to leave the game and continue a conversation on a different platform.
“When a child moves from a game platform to a private messaging app because someone asked them to, that escalation can be hard to detect and kids may not recognise it as something worth mentioning,” Gorrie said.
The study found a gap in parental comfort levels around speaking to their children about risks and the behaviours their children actually engaged in.
It found that 32% of parents reported their kids had gone on their device past their bedtime and 12% reported their children watched explicit content.
“The gap … does not mean conversations aren’t happening, but it does suggest that having the talk is only part of the picture,” the report said.
It said that conversations used to focus on strangers, passwords and screen time but now have expanded to include AI-generated images, digital impersonation, online relationships and critical thinking.
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