META is officially launching new parental controls that make it easier to monitor teens’ interactions with the company’s AI. Meta revealed the news in a blog post on ThursdayWhich comes six months after the company’s original announcement. But while the additional parental controls are promising, will it be enough to address the larger issues with younger users and AI?
According to Meta, parents who use the “Supervisions” feature on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram now have an “Insights” tab as part of the supervision. If you select this tab, you’ll see all the topics your teen or teens have been chatting about with your AI bot over the last seven days. There are many topics that may appear here, including “School,” “Entertainment,” “Lifestyle,” “Travel,” “Writing,” and “Health & Wellness.”
However, these are only superficial topics. If you tap on one, you’ll see all the different categories covered in that single topic. Like, if your teen is talking about “Lifestyle” with Meta AI, you can tap on the topic to see that they’re having conversations about things including fashion, food, and vacations. If their conversation is related to health and wellness, you can tap to see conversations about fitness, physical health, and mental health. Importantly, you can’t see the conversations themselves: only the topics that Meta’s AI has populated.
Meta says its AI should only return results that would fit into a PG-13-rated movie. Thus, the bot may refuse to answer certain questions, although the subjects of these requests will still be recorded in the new Insights tab. The company says it’s still working on tools to alert parents if their teens start talking to the meta AI about suicide or self-harm. It also comes with a series of questions you can ask your teen if you don’t feel “confident” discussing the topic of AI with your kids. Questions are available in the Family Center.
No one can deny the fact that children and teenagers today Growing up in an AI world-But that doesn’t mean the technology should be unregulated (or unsupervised). Unfortunately, when it comes to monitoring AI use with minors, tech companies are a little late to the game at worst, and get involved maliciously at worst. Meta, for its part, originally allowed its AI bots to have extremely inappropriate interactions with underage users before a viral Reuters report in August forced it to change. Two months later, the company announced these new parental controls that they are now implementing.
What do you think so far?
It’s clear that these new features and policies are not here out of genuine concern for Meta’s underage users. The official meta policy allowed AI bots to engage in sexual role-playing with children and teenagers, and explicitly allowed bots to respond to racist questions with racist answers. These changes are in response to being caught, not for the well-being of users.
That being said, it’s nice that Meta is finally allowing parents to see the topics their kids are talking about to the Meta AI, especially if there’s a related topic to flag. But why can’t parents disable Meta AI completely? Why should teens who have an Instagram or WhatsApp account be connected to Meta AI? And Meta’s own Insights tab says that, because the topics are organized automatically, they may not be accurate, meaning the AI ​​program that summarizes your teen’s conversation topics may be confusing some of those topics.
At the end of the day, the best approach may still be to have an open and honest dialogue with your teen about AI use — though I’m not sure relying on Meta’s Family Center questions is the right move.
