Meta’s Instagram is adding chatbot controls for parents next year

The new controls will allow parents to prevent their children from speaking with AI chatbots entirely or deny access to certain characters they don’t like, Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Meta AI head Alexander Wang wrote in a letter. Blog post The changes will be announced on Friday. The Meta’s AI Assistant is a notable exception to this rule. The company says it “will remain available to provide useful information and educational opportunities” while “providing age-appropriate protections.”

Parents will also get some form of “insight” into how their children will use AI, Mita said, though there were few details about what this might look like in practice. From the Meta description, it appears that “Insights” will take the form of a high-level summary of “topics teens are talking about with AI characters” and the Meta AI Assistant. The company says it hopes the information will enable parents to “have thoughtful conversations with their teens about AI interactions.”

Mosseri and Wang said they “hope today’s updates will bring parents some peace of mind that their teens can make the most of all the benefits AI has to offer.” Parents will have to wait a little longer to discover said peace of mind: the controls won’t be available until “early next year.” Until then, it will be limited to Instagram and only to English-speaking users in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Meta said it plans to expand controls across its platforms in the future, and said it “will have more to share soon.”

This is one of the first major security updates Meta has made to its AI chatbots since rolling them out across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It comes on the heels of Another major update It was pushed out just this week which limits the content that teen Instagram accounts can view, in line with what you’d see in a PG-13 movie.