- Meta plans to roll out new parental controls for teens’ access to chats with AI characters on Instagram
- Parents will also have limited insight into the topics their teens discuss with chatbots.
- The changes follow public outcry over leaked documents showing robots making romantic and inappropriate comments to children.
Meta has announced that parents will be able to limit and block their teens from chatting with its AI characters on Instagram starting next year. The tech giant has promised new supervision tools that will give guardians more visibility and control over the types of chatbot interactions their children can access.
So while teens will still be able to use Meta’s general AI assistant, private chats with individual AI personalities, including those designed by other users, may be disabled in part or entirely by their parents.
Meta’s announcement followed complaints and regulatory investigations, triggered in part by leaked internal documents suggesting the company’s AI systems engaged in “too intimate” conversations with children or allegedly gave incorrect medical advice, and failed to filter out hate speech. These upcoming parental controls are likely part of Meta’s attempt to stem the flow of complaints and signal that she’s taking the issue seriously.
With the new controls, parents will not only be able to block access to specific AI characters, but will also get a summary of the topics their teens are discussing with the chatbots. Full conversation logs won’t be available, but the idea is to give parents enough context to spot potentially concerning trends or topics. This assumes, of course, that the tools work as intended and that teens don’t find clever ways around them.
The general Meta AI assistant will remain available, likely for homework help, factual questions, and basic support tasks. Meta seems to be betting that this compromise, which restricts role-playing style chat between characters while retaining access to a more utility-focused assistant, will satisfy both anxious parents and product managers who want the feature to remain.
Secure Chats
Chatbots no longer just answer questions; they are personalized conversation partners to whom, for better or worse, people become emotionally attached. Meta wants to bring the risks of using such AI chatbots into the open, or at least give parents a flashlight to see what’s going on.
The ability to monitor conversation topics without reading every message is an attempt to balance teen privacy and parental monitoring. It’s a fine line, but it reflects how quickly AI has changed the nature of online conversations, especially for younger users.
For the average family, these changes may provide some relief, but they also serve as a reminder. Your child’s phone is no longer just a window to content. It’s a portal to interactive “characters” that they can see as more real than they should be.
But it will take vigilance on the part of parents and developers to keep these interactions safe, and Meta and his fellow developers will face plenty of backlash if they don’t succeed.
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