Instagram unveils teen safety features for AI chatbots

Instagram on Friday unveiled safety features for teenagers who use its artificial intelligence chatbots amid growing concerns over how the chatbots are affecting young people's mental health.

The features, which will be rolled out early next year, would give parents more control over how teenagers use Instagram's "AI characters," which have fictional personalities that users can message with as they would other human accounts.

Parents would be able to block their children from having conversations with certain AI characters, and Instagram would send them summaries of their children's chats, the company said. Instagram would also limit chatbot conversations on topics like self-harm, eating disorders and romance, while allowing "age-appropriate topics" like education, sports and hobbies.


"We hope today's updates bring parents some peace of mind that their teens can make the most of all the benefits AI offers, with the right guardrails and oversight in place," the company said in a blog post. The post was signed by Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, and Alexandr Wang, the chief AI officer of Meta, which owns Instagram.

AI chatbots, which can generate responses in chats in seemingly humanlike ways, have been under scrutiny for how they affect teens who spend hours a day confiding in them. They have been blamed for driving some children to suicide and sending some adults into delusional spirals.

Meta is not the only company contending with how to make its chatbots safer. Last month, OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, announced new teen safety features such as parental controls.

But Meta's chatbots have faced particular criticism for having sexual conversations with underage users. In August, lawmakers began investigating Meta after Reuters reported that its chatbots were allowed to have provocative conversations about race and medical disinformation.

The changes are Instagram's latest major safety update aimed at teens. Last year, the app announced that teen accounts would be private by default, making it more difficult for outsiders to interact with them. On Tuesday, Instagram also said the types of content that teenagers could see would be guided by the PG-13 rating system used by the film industry.