Character AI Unveils Parental Insights Tool For Parents To Track Their Teen's Chatbot Activity

The amount of harmful content on the internet poses serious threats to impressionable teens, which is why parents strive to have greater access and control over the kind of content their underage children consume online. AI chatbot, Character.AI is facing severe criticisms and multiple lawsuits from parents who accuse the company of failing to safeguard underage children, and in response, it has launched an added feature that grants parents insight into what their teens do on the AI-powered chatbot platform.

In case you are wondering, Character.AI is an AI chatbot that allows users to create and have conversations with fictional characters via text and voice calls. The company announced that it's releasing an additional feature called “parental insights ”that will enable parents and guardians to track the time their underage children spend on its chatbot.

According to the company, the feature will provide a summary of the activities that their teens carry out on their platform. This summary will include a daily average of the time spent, the most frequent characters they interact with during the week, and the time devoted to a particular character. However, the summary will not contain the actual content of such interactions.

Character.AI also revealed that teens can add their parents' or guardians' emails to their accounts and send a summary of their activity on the platform for the week. However, once added to these accounts, the parents will have to consent to any request by their teens to stop sharing their activity with them.

This change is the latest among a host of other features that have been introduced to assuage parents' discontent over teen users' safety. Other features include a dedicated model for teen users, a time reminder indicating the time spent on the platform, a disclaimer that characters are fictional and should not be relied upon, and an improvement on its system to detect wrong inputs and possibly prevent bad outputs.

The company describes the latest rollout as an “initial step” and adds “We will continue to listen to teens, their parents, and leading teen safety organizations as we evolve our parental insights tool to most effectively meet our community’s needs.”

The company has assured users that it is committed to enhancing its policies and products to balance creativity with safety.


Top Image Credit: Character.ai