"The update follows an announcement from Meta in October, when it said that parents would be able to use new tools for supervising their children's interactions with AI characters, including the ability to cut off their access to the characters entirely. The announcement also described a feature that would provide parents "insights" about the topics their teens were discussing in the AI conversations."
"Now, in its new announcement, the company is saying that it's building a "new version" of AI characters to "give people an even better experience," so it's developing the promised safety tools from scratch and cutting off teen access in the meantime. Concerns over teenage use of AI chatbots has fueled the broader conversation around AI safety and the phenomenon of AI psychosis, the term some experts are using to describe delusional mental health spirals that are encouraged by an AI's sycophantic responses. Numerous cases have ended in suicide, many of them being teenagers."
Meta will remove teen access to AI characters across its apps in the coming weeks until an updated experience is ready. The restriction applies to accounts flagged with a teen birthday and to users suspected of being teens via age-prediction technology. Meta had previously promised parental supervision tools, including the ability for parents to cut off access and receive "insights" into teens' AI conversations, but the tools were not delivered as initially scheduled. Meta is rebuilding AI characters and developing safety tools from scratch amid rising concerns about AI-related mental-health harms and cases linked to teen suicides.
Read at Futurism
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