Crayons × Code: Re‐Exploring Children's Drawings With Multimodal <scp>AI</scp> and Dynamic Ethics

ABSTRACT Children's drawings are used to study their environmental perception, but AI‐powered analysis of these visual materials remains underexplored. This paper re‐explores the use of children's drawings as a tool for understanding their perceptions of the environment, leveraging multimodal AI for analysis. The study revisits a dataset of 188 drawings created by 94 children, comparing AI‐based analysis with human interpretations to examine the strengths and limitations of AI in visual research. It focuses on the ability of multimodal AI to detect and classify the visual elements of children's drawings, whilst also investigating potential links between these elements and various health or demographic factors, including physical activity, gender and age, through a combination of quantitative statistical analyses. The research highlights the potential and challenges of AI in interpreting the complexity of children's drawings. The paper, based on ethical reflections, also addresses the ethical implications of using AI in sensitive contexts, proposing dynamic ethics to ensure responsible use of technology in research involving children. This study offers new insights into the intersection of AI, ethics and visual research.