Character AI, the California-based artificial intelligence (AI) platform, introduced a new safety feature on Tuesday. Dubbed Parental Insights, the feature is aimed at the platform’s users under the age of 18. These users can add a parent or guardian’s email address, and the platform will send them a summary of their teen’s activity. The new parental control tool is aimed at offering more transparency between parents and teenagers about the latter’s in-app activities. The teenager safety feature comes after the company faced multiple lawsuits due to the AI chatbot’s harmful responses to underage users.
Character AI Introduces Parental Insights Feature
In a blog post, the AI firm announced the rollout of the new feature. It will be available to both the premium users and those on the free tier. All registered users under the age of 18 can access the feature and choose to send a summary of their in-app activities to their parent or guardian. “These insights help give a clearer understanding of how users under 18 engage with Character.AI,” said the post.
Characters AI’s Parental Insights feature
Photo Credit: Character AI
Parents and guardians of the teen user will receive a daily report containing information such as the daily average time spent on the platform across web and mobile apps, the top AI characters they interacted with most frequently, as well as time spent with each AI character. The platform stated that these insights would tell the parent details about their teenager’s engagement patterns. Notably, no chat content will be shared via these reports.
To add the email address of a parent or guardian, the underage user will need to navigate to Settings, Preferences >, and select the Parental Insights tab. A new page will open that will allow the user to add the email address. Once added, the platform will share an invite to the addressee’s inbox. By tapping the “Agree” icon at the bottom of the email, users can confirm to receive daily reports.
In case a user wants to stop sharing their activity, they can request to remove the email address by selecting the dropdown menu next to the address in the parental insights tab. The parent or guardian will receive an email informing them that a request for email removal has been made. They will need to confirm before the email address can be removed.
