Common Sense - AI Ratings
All ages · free · AI Product · commonsense.org ↗
Common Sense AI Ratings is a public web resource that reviews AI systems used by kids, teens, and schools. It explains how products work, what risks they carry, and where safety, bias, transparency, and effectiveness claims hold up or break down. In practice, it functions like a decision guide for families and educators trying to make sense of a fast-moving AI market.
Common Sense - AI Ratings has focused developmental strength worth knowing about. It builds judgment. The main growth opportunity: the resource is mostly for adults and older teens. Younger children are unlikely to use it directly.
Strengths & gaps
Strengths
- ● Judgment is the clear spike. Common Sense is asking users to weigh evidence, transparency, risk, and tradeoffs instead of taking AI marketing at face value.
- ● The resource is independent and explicit about method. That gives families a much better base for informed choice than app-store hype or social buzz.
- ● It can also support good family conversation. Used together with a teen, the ratings can shift a purchase decision into a discernment exercise.
Gaps
- ○ The resource is mostly for adults and older teens. Younger children are unlikely to use it directly.
- ○ It is a decision aid, not a practice environment. That limits persistence, creativity, and self-regulation signals.
Detailed scores
How Common Sense - AI Ratings performs on each of the 9 literacies in our framework.
Doing
— 0 of 3 Strong
Common Sense AI Ratings helps families choose deliberately instead of drifting into whatever AI tool is loudest or newest. That is a real agency gain at the household level. It is still one step removed from direct child action, so it does not reach Strong.
This is not a child task environment. It does not ask kids to sustain effort through challenge. Persistence is outside scope.
The ratings framework is built around revisiting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks as products evolve. That supports changing course when evidence changes. It is a useful adaptive decision model, even if it is not a deep training environment.
Thinking
— 1 of 3 Strong
The resource invites better questions about AI: how does this work, what data does it use, what could go wrong, and who is it good for? That builds inquiry more than simple thumbs-up product lists do. The experience is still fairly bounded, so Moderate fits.
Common Sense AI Ratings is not a making tool. It does not ask the child to create, revise, or experiment artistically. Creativity is outside scope.
Judgment is the point of the product. Users are asked to compare evidence, assess transparency, notice bias and safety risks, and weigh tradeoffs across tools. That is exactly the kind of discernment the rubric is trying to reward.
Being
— 0 of 3 Strong
The resource is built for shared use by families and educators. It can support better conversation and joint decision-making around AI tools. That is positive, though indirect.
The site may inform better choices, but it does not teach in-the-moment self-control or emotional regulation. Self-Regulation is outside scope.
The resource helps people choose tools wisely. It does not directly connect activity to identity, values, or contribution in a sustained way.
Based on 4 sources
Reviewed by New Literacies
Scored by our research-derived framework · AI-assisted analysis with editorial review · 4 sources reviewed · Our methodology →
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