Today, we’re sharing our vision for supporting parents who help their teens navigate AI, including announcing new controls that allow parents to see – and manage – how their teens interact with AI characters. Every day, teens use our platforms to stay connected with friends and explore their interests, and AI can unlock even more of these opportunities, allowing them to learn new skills, like coding or graphic design, or helping them with difficult subjects after school.
We recognize that parents already have a lot on their plate when it comes to surfing the internet safely with their teens, and we’re committed to providing them with helpful tools and resources that make things easier for them, especially when thinking about new technologies like AI.
We’ve already introduced age-appropriate protections in our AI features, like designing our AIs to give teens responses guided by PG-13 movie ratings, but we want to do even more to allow parents to monitor their teens’ AI experiences.
New ways for parents to shape their teens’ interactions with AI
In addition to the automatic protections already provided by teen accounts, we’re introducing new monitoring tools for parents to help them make informed decisions about the AI characters their teens chat with. Here are the updates we plan to make:
- Parents can choose to completely disable their teen’s access to one-on-one chats with AI characters. Meta’s AI assistant will remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities, with default age-appropriate protections in place to keep teens safe.
- Parents will be able to block specific AI characters if they do not want to completely disable access to AI characters.
- Parents will get insight into the topics their teens are discussing with AI characters – and Meta’s AI assistant – so they can have thoughtful conversations with their teens about interactions with AI.
Technology will never replace the value of critical thinking, real connections and human interaction – and that’s not our goal. We believe AI can complement traditional methods of learning and exploration in a way that feels positive, all with age-appropriate guardrails in place.
Existing Protections for Teens Using AI
In speaking with parents, we regularly hear that their concerns about their teens’ technology use fall into three categories: who they interact with, what type of content they see, and whether their time is being well spent.
We created teen accounts with these concerns in mind and applied a similar framework to teen protections when interacting with AI, which we will continue to evolve on. As we announced earlier this week, we updated AI experiences for teens will be guided by PG-13 ratingsmeaning that AIs shouldn’t give age-inappropriate responses that wouldn’t seem out of place in a PG-13 movie. We have already started rolling out these changes in English in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.
Additional protections include:
- AI characters are designed not to engage in age-inappropriate discussions about self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders with adolescents, nor in conversations that encourage, promote, or enable these topics. Our AIs are designed to safely answer these topics and direct teens, where appropriate, to resources or expert support.
- Teens can only interact with a limited group of AI characters, focused on age-appropriate topics like education, sports, and entertainment – not romance or other inappropriate content.
- Parents can see if their teens are chatting with AI characters and set time limits for using the app, at just 15 minutes per day in total. This includes time spent talking to AIs.
We know that teenagers may try to circumvent these protections, which is why we are also using AI technology placing those we suspect of being adolescents in these protections, even if they tell us they are adults.
What parents can expect next
AI is evolving rapidly, which means we will need to constantly adapt and strengthen our protections for adolescents, while also listening and responding to parents’ concerns about this new technology. We hope that today’s updates will give parents some peace of mind knowing that their teens will be able to make the most of all the benefits that AI offers, with the appropriate safeguards and monitoring in place.
We’re currently building these new parental supervision controls and you’ll start to see these changes, starting with Instagram, early next year. As with our teen account protections, we plan to roll them out in English first, in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Making updates that affect billions of users across Meta platforms is something we need to do carefully, and we’ll have more to share soon.
