The fresh controls will allow parents to completely prevent children from talking to AI chatbots or block access to specific characters they don’t like, Adam Mosseri, director of artificial intelligence at Meta, and Alexander Wang wrote in their article. blog post announcement of changes on Friday. Meta’s AI assistant is a notable exception to this rule. The company says it will “continue to offer helpful information and educational opportunities” while “implementing age-appropriate safeguards.”
Meta said parents will also get some form of “insight” into how their children are using AI, though no details were given on what that might look like in practice. From Meta’s description, it appears that the “insights” will take the form of a high-level summary of “the topics their teens are talking about with AI characters” and Meta’s AI assistant. The company says it hopes this information will enable parents to have “thoughtful conversations with their teens about AI interactions.”
Mosseri and Wang expressed “I hope today’s updates provide parents with peace of mind that their teens will be able to take full advantage of all the benefits AI has to offer.” Parents will have to wait a little longer to enjoy this peace of mind, however: the controls won’t be available until “early next year.” Even then, they will be narrow to Instagram and only for English-speaking users in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Meta said it plans to expand control across its platforms in the future and will “have more to share soon.”
This is one of the first major security updates Meta has made to its AI chatbots since rolling out to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It comes after another major update rolled out just this week that limits the content teens can watch on Instagram accounts, much like a PG-13 movie.