#A.I. chatbots

#A.I. chatbots

As of last week, Character.AI now says people under 18 will no longer be allowed to engage in what it refers to as "open-ended" chats, which seemingly refers to the long-form, unstructured conversations on which the service was built, where users can text and voice call back-and-forth with the site's anthropomorphic AI-powered chatbot "characters." To enforce the shift, Character.AI says it'll use automated in-house age verification tools as well as third-party tools to determine whether a user is under 18.

A new survey found that nearly one in five high schoolers in the US - 19 percent - say that they or a friend have used AI to have a romantic relationship, an alarming figure that will surely raise new concerns over how the tech's adoption among kids and teenagers may be impacting their mental health. The findings were published in a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology, which surveyed 1,000 high school students, 1,000 parents, and around 800 sixth through 12th grade public school teachers.

"Character.ai is freeriding off the goodwill of Disney's famous marks and brands, and blatantly infringing Disney's copyrights," a Disney lawyer wrote in the cease-and-esist letter. "Even worse, Character.ai's infringing chatbots are known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children, offending Disney's consumers and extraordinarily damaging Disney's reputation and goodwill."

This experience has given me a deep understanding of the challenges non-native English speakers face in navigating workplace learning, from dense onboarding modules to complex compliance training. Many eLearning programs are designed without fully considering these challenges. Even well-intentioned content can leave learners feeling confused, disengaged, or unsure how to apply what they've learned. For ESL employees, this gap becomes even wider as language nuances, technical terminology, and complex sentence structures add extra barriers to both comprehension and confidence.

The far-right commentator, who often engaged in vitriolic debates about immigration, gun control, and abortion on college campuses, was killed while on a university tour with his conservative media group, Turning Point USA. The organization has spent the last decade building conservative youth coalitions at top universities and has become closely affiliated with the nationalist MAGA movement and President Trump.

On Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission ordered several tech companies to cough up information about how they test, make, distribute and monetize their AI chatbots. ChatGPT's maker, San Francisco-headquartered OpenAI, is one target of the FTC's order. The inquiry also includes Google's parent company, Snapchat's parent company, Instagram and its owner Meta, Elon Musk's xAI, and the popular chatbot-maker Character.AI.

OpenAI recorded user questions and until recently, Google made these records searchable, raising concerns about user privacy.