Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

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Privacy<br>Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

Joseph Cox

May 18, 2026<br>at 9:17 AM

“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.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash.

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.<br>“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.”<br>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.<br>💡<br>Do you know anything else about how researchers are using AI? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

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.<br>“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.<br>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.”

Photos of the notice given to parents. Image: 404 Media.<br>Only the research teams would have used the annotated videos to train “secure, private AI models.”<br>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.”<br>Finally, the collected footage and data may be shared with others “to support future early childhood education research,” the document says.<br>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.<br>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....