Social media giant Meta has been focused on its teenage users of late, spurred on by leaked reports that its AI products were interacting inappropriately with youngsters. One of the changes that resulted from this new focus was the creation of teen accounts, which recently got even cleaner on the company’s Instagram platform. Next up? More robust parental controls concerning AI chatbots across the company’s services.
A new Meta
That’s the plan, anyway, since Meta hasn’t quite finished baking its solutions. In an effort to show everyone that something is being done, it has outlined changes coming to chatbot access. Specifically, the new powers parents will be granted over those small humans using Teen accounts.
Parents will be given the ability to entirely block off children’s access to one-on-one chats with Meta’s AI personalities, or limit a few that they’re not comfortable with the youngsters interacting with. The main AI assistant “will remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities, with default, age-appropriate protections in place to help keep teens safe.” That, and Meta doesn’t want to take a hit to its reported daily AI users.
Also coming for parents are “insights into the topics their teens are chatting about with AI characters – and Meta’s AI assistant.” It’s probably not spying if the parents are simply being sent an automated progress report, right? Still, it’s good to be certain that your offspring hasn’t had the ridiculously simple recipe for mustard gas jammed into their brain by an over-compliant large language model.
These changes have yet to be implemented (or completed, even), but they’ll first launch in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia — all countries with a tendency to complain about teenagers doing teenager things. They’re also English-speaking, for the most part, and that’s the language Meta is focusing on for its initial rollout. Expect the ability to lock down AI chatbots sometime in the new year, beginning with Instagram. After all, teenagers are only on Facebook because that’s where they speak to their parents, much to Mark Zuckerberg’s dismay.
