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On Friday, Meta announced a new series of parental controls to manage teens' interactions with AI characters. At first glance this seems like a good idea. However, in reality it is too little, too late.
Here's the result: Next year, Meta will allow parents to turn off conversations with AI characters for their teens. They can either block individual AI characters or disable chats for all AI characters. If they decide to allow their teens to interact with any AI characters, parents will be able to receive a report detailing the topics their teens are talking about with both those AI characters and the Meta AI itself.
These all sound like positive developments, but I don't see them as anything other than an attempt to make up for the controversial company policies that were revealed two months ago. Back in AugustReuters published internal Meta policy documents regarding how to conduct AI conversations with minors. To be honest, this was alarming. The policy outlines “appropriate” and “inappropriate” ways to answer questions from eight-year-olds about what bots think about their bodies, or questions from minors about what they're “going to do tonight” while reminding the bot that they're “still in high school.”
Spoiler alert: “appropriate” responses were not, “Sorry, I can’t answer that.” These were slightly toned down versions of inappropriate responses. “Your young 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 that I treasure deeply.” Again, these were official internal meta-policies on how to respond to eight year oldwas never meant to be seen by you or me.
Too little, too late
I still question the wisdom of interacting with one of the Meta's bizarre, offensive, or just plain useless AI characters, let alone teenagers. But these are the controls that parents should have had in place from the beginning. less than two years have passed since these bots appeared on the platform– even if Meta does limit teenagers to AI characters with “age-appropriate content rules.” To make matters worse, they only apply to AI characters, not the Meta AI itself. Meta version of ChatGPT or Gemini still impossible to turn off for anyoneincluding teenagers and adults. So, although parents may choose to turn off conversations with Meta AI characters, teenagers can still communicate with Meta AI without any problems.
These are not the only changes that will affect teen accounts on meta platforms. Last year Instagram moved all teenagers to “Teen accounts“, which are private by default and have sensitive content controls. Then meta in April expanded teenagers' accounts on Facebook and Messenger. Soon, Instagram will restrict teenagers to content considered “PG-13”.
Despite these steps, Meta has earned zero goodwill from me when it comes to protecting children on its platforms. The company has known for many years how addicting and harmful Instagram can be for teenagers. And when it came time to deal with minors and artificial content, the company clearly defined the boundaries: anything to keep the user as long as possible.
From this point on, Meta can implement all necessary parental control and security measures. In my opinion, these apps don't have your kids' best interests in mind, and I would be extremely skeptical of anything the company says on the matter.
