Meta announced an update to its teen supervision tools, which will now enable parents to view what their kids are asking its artificial intelligence chatbot.
The update was included as a new element in Meta’s Family Center tools, allowing parents to access a list of their kids’ Meta AI queries.
Meta said that these topics are automatically categorized by AI, so the list provides a fairly broad overview of queries, rather than specific details. The idea is that this will give parents some level of transparency, in case their kids are researching areas of concern.
As per Meta: “Topics can range from School, Entertainment, and Lifestyle to Travel, Writing, and Health and Wellbeing, among others. Parents can tap on a topic to see the different categories that fall within each one. For example, categories within Lifestyle include fashion, food, and holidays, and categories within Health and Wellbeing include fitness, physical health, and mental health.”
So again, it won’t be a specific overview of the exact questions, but it could help parents better understand the bigger picture, which may help alert adults to elements they should know about, such as health concerns.
Maybe kids shouldn’t be relying on AI for these types of questions, but in theory this topic list can give parents a means to raise issues with teens and to ensure better information flow.
Though it could also end up being an awkward prompt to start relevant conversations.
Part of the challenge here is that the topic categories are extremely broad, so if a teen is looking up health-related subjects, that could be a major concern, a minor query, or even an unrelated question, depending on how the tool categorizes each. As such, this oversight could end up worrying parents unnecessarily, even if it has the potential to provide more insight into their child’s activity.
That said, Meta noted that it’s committed to providing more insight about especially concerning questions.
“While the insights are designed to give parents greater visibility into the general topics their teens are asking Meta AI about, for sensitive issues related to suicide and self-harm, we’re going further,” Meta said. “We recently announced that we’re developing new alerts to let parents know if their teen tries to engage in conversations related to suicide or self-harm with Meta AI — and we’ll have more to share on those alerts soon.”
Meta said it has also worked with the Cyberbullying Research Center to develop conversation starters to help parents ask their teens about their search activity.
“These conversation starters are available on the Family Center website, and parents can also access them through a link in the new Insights tab,” Meta said.
So Meta wants to address these concerns, and ensure that parents are as informed as possible regarding potential issues, and how to raise them with their children.
Meta said it will continue to improve and refine the system to make it a more valuable and useful resource over time, based on feedback from users and expert advisors.
Meta’s new AI chatbot insights are now available for parents supervising Teen Accounts in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and Brazil, with further expansion coming soon.
