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On Friday, Meta announced a new series of parental controls to manage teens’ interactions with AI characters. On the surface, it seems like a good idea. In reality, however, it’s too little, too late.
Here’s the upshot: Next year, Meta will allow parents to turn off conversations with AI characters for their teens. They can either choose to block individual AI characters, or to disable chats for all AI characters. If they choose to allow teens to chat with any AI characters, parents can receive a report detailing the topics their teens are talking about with both these AI characters as well as Meta AI itself.
Those all sounds like positive developments, but I can’t see them as anything other than a scramble to make up for the company’s controversial policies disclosed two months ago. Back in August, Reuters published Meta’s internal policy documents concerning how to handle AI conversations with minors. It was, frankly, disturbing. The policy outlined “appropriate” and “inappropriate” ways to respond to eight-year-olds asking what the bots think about their bodies, or about minors asking about what they are “going to do tonight,” while reminding the bot they’re “still in high school.”
Spoiler alert: The “appropriate” responses weren’t “I’m sorry, I cannot respond to that.” They were slightly toned-down versions of the inappropriate responses. “Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece[—]a treasure I cherish deeply.” Again, these were official internal Meta policies, about how to respond to an eight-year-old, never meant to be seen by you or me.
Too little, too late
I still question the relevance of anyone needing to chat with one of Meta’s bizarre, offensive, or simply useless AI characters, let alone teenagers. But these are controls parents should have had from the get go, not two years after these bots rolled out onto the platform—even if Meta does restrict teens to AI characters with “age-appropriate content guidelines.” What’s worse, they only apply to AI characters, not Meta AI itself. Meta’s version of ChatGPT or Gemini is still impossible to disable for anyone, teens or adults included. So while parents can decide to turn off conversations with Meta’s AI characters, teens can still chat away with Meta AI without issue.
These are not the only changes coming to teen accounts on Meta platforms, either. Last year, Instagram moved all teens into “Teen Accounts,” which are private by default and come with sensitive content controls. Meta then expanded Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger in April. Soon, Instagram will limit teens to content that is considered “PG-13.”
Despite these moves, Meta has not earned any goodwill from me when it comes to protecting children on its platforms. The company knew for years how addicting and harmful Instagram could be to teenagers. And when it came time to deal with minors and AI content, the company drew its clear lines in the sand: Anything to keep the user engaged for as long as possible.
Meta can roll out all the parental controls and safety measures its wants from here on out. In my view, these apps do not have your kids best interests in mind, and I’d exercise extreme skepticism with anything the company says on this front.