To create the “Talk to Alex” campaign, Alex was exposed to more than 5,000 real-life experiences of Romanian children who had been bullied in school
BUCHAREST, 26 June – A curious, cheerful and football-crazy 9-year-old becomes anxious, withdrawn and silent after you tease him, in a new campaign by Save the Children in Romania to highlight the profound and sometimes invisible effect that bullying has on children.
Of course, the boy isn’t real. Alex – an AI agent based on the profile of a 9-year-old child – is part of a campaign by the aid organization in partnership with Heist Industries, a creative agency, to combine technology with empathy and show how a child can be transformed by hurtful words.
To create the “Talk to Alex” campaign, Alex was exposed to more than 5,000 real-life experiences of Romanian children who had been bullied in school. Bullying is a particularly acute problem in Romania. According to an OECD report, Romania is one of the European countries with the highest level of bullying in schools [1] and one in two school aged children is a victim of bullying.[2]
Carmen, a Romanian mother of two children aged 8 and 5 years old, said that talking to Alex helped her to remember what it felt like to be bullied in school and opened up a way to initiate conversations with her own children about bullying.
“I was bullied as a child. I didn’t know it was called bullying at the time, but I remember how much it hurt me. Now I see something has changed in my 8-year-old daughter, I know she’s not in a good place at school—but I don't know how to reach her. Talking to Alex helped me remember how it felt back then, and gave me the courage to start a real conversation with her."
Cristina Adam, the program coordinator at Save the Children Romania, said:
“Our main target of this experiment is adults because we started from the assumption that bullying in schools is hidden from adults. When children go home they’re too afraid to talk about it. Usually we don’t know what they go through but by using Alex they can see the effects of bullying on a child and this can help to create empathy.
Radu Pilat, Creative Director, Heist Industries, said:
"When we finished setting up Alex we wondered: ‘If a child created from code and algorithms can be affected so much by words, what about a real child who feels fear, shame and loneliness?’ Alex isn't just an AI Agent, he's a painful metaphor for what many children experience every day. Through him, we want to make the consequences of bullying harder and harder to ignore.”
Data collected by Save the Children in 2022 from a pool of 4,449 children aged 10 to 17 shows that almost half of Romanian schoolchildren say they have been bullied - a significant increase from 2016 (29%).
Gabriela Alexandrescu, Executive President of Save the Children Romania, said:
"Alex is a painful but necessary experiment. It is a simulation of a real child who has become a mirror of the thousands of messages real children receive every day. No one is immune to bullying, if an AI can be so deeply affected, it is hard to imagine the impact on a child.
Children need responsible adults in schools, in families and in communities and they need those adults to create support networks and clear and simple mechanisms to prevent bullying. Save the Children offers free information, emotional support and psychological counselling for children affected by bullying.”
The campaign was developed by Heist Industries while the technical component was provided by Invergent, the agency that developed Alex.
Save the Children has been working in Romania for 35 years to build social programmes and public policies that benefit children. Since 2002, with the establishment of five counselling centres for children and families, the organisation has assumed a fundamental role in promoting positive education, supporting specialised psychological interventions.
Save the Children also launched the first national study dedicated to studying bullying in schools in Romania.
Save the Children is inviting people to visit https://alex.farabullying.ro and interact with Alex.
Notes to editors
For media enquiries please contact
Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Global Media Manager: Asia
Amy.Lefevre@savethechildren.orgOut of hours (BST) contact
media@savethechildren.org.uk
