AI bot site bans minors

Character AI is banning minors from using its chatbots amid growing concerns about the effects of artificial intelligence conversations on children The company is facing several lawsuits over child safety including by the mother of a teenager who says the company s chatbots pushed her teenage son to kill himself Character Technologies the Menlo Park California-based company behind Character AI stated Wednesday it will be removing the ability of users under to participate in open-ended chats with AI characters The changes will go into effect by Nov and a two-hour daily limit will start this instant Character AI added that it is working on new features for kids such as the ability to create videos stories and streams with AI characters The company is also setting up an AI safety lab Character AI commented it will be rolling out age-verification functions to help determine which users are under A growing number of tech platforms are turning to age checks to keep children from accessing tools that aren t safe for them But these are imperfect and a large number of kids find avenues to get around them Face scans for instance can t unfailingly tell if someone is or And there are privacy concerns around asking people to upload establishment IDs Character AI an app that allows users to create customizable characters or interact with those generated by others spans experiences from imaginative play to mock job interviews The company says the artificial personas are designed to feel alive and humanlike Imagine speaking to super intelligent and lifelike chat bot Characters that hear you understand you and remember you reads a description for the app on Google Play We encourage you to push the frontier of what s attainable with this innovative innovation Critics welcomed the move but explained it is not enough and should have been done earlier Meetali Jain executive director of the Tech Justice Law Project announced There are still a lot of details left open They have not addressed how they will operationalize age verification how they will ensure their methods are privacy preserving nor have they addressed the viable psychological impact of suddenly disabling access to young users given the emotional dependencies that have been created Jain stated Moreover these changes do not address the underlying design features that facilitate these emotional dependencies not just for children but also for people over the age of years