How does AI fit in with Filtering?
We know that lots of school staff are using gen AI sites like ChatGPT and others to reduce workload for planning lessons and other tasks.
When it comes to students though, we do recommend caution. For most schools it would be best to not allow ChatGPT for any student policies but we appreciate some will want to.
The key issue regarding filtering to be aware of is that we can only allow or block ChatGPT - we can't block individual queries if for example the student is trying to talk about something inappropriate or if the engine starts giving bad information or child-inappropriate elements. Whilst ChatGPT will block the most obvious attempts, this can happen, so it's important to risk assess this and for the safeguarding team and senior leaders to be aware of this.
Please note though that the use of monitoring (our schools can get Senso via monitoring.lgfl.net and this will capture more where inappropriate elements are typed although it cannot prevent anything).
Open AI which runs ChatGPT says on their website "ChatGPT is not meant for children under 13, and we require that children ages 13 to 18 obtain parental consent before using ChatGPT" source.
It's very important also to follow the new DfE guidelines on Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education and also the product safety expectations: Generative AI: product safety expectations.
For more on gen AI harms and also what schools need to do, please take a look at our recent newsletter on the subject.
Allowing AI in SchoolProtect / HomeProtect
Both SchoolProtect and HomeProtect have categories for AI that are blocked by default and given the above, we strongly suggest not allowing the whole category, but only the specific services that your school has risk-assessed and chosen to use.
To do this you simply need to add the correct URLs for the platform you wish to use to your policy allow lists:
ChatGPT - chatgpt.com and openai.com
Microsoft Copilot - copilot.cloud.microsoft (for the enterprise/education version of CoPilot) and copilot.microsoft.com (for the consumer / Windows version)
Google Gemini - gemini.google.com
ClaudeAI - claude.ai