Character.AI attempts to appease concerned parents with new feature

Character.AI, the popular AI chatbot service, has added Parental Insights, a new safety feature gives parents reports on their kids’ activity on the platform.

The new safety measure, which the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday, gives parents a weekly overview about how their teens spend their time on Character.AI. Specifically, Parental Insights will tell them their kids’ daily average time on the app, the characters they talk to most often, and the amount of time spent with each character. However, the overview will not divulge the contents of the chatbot conversations, as they are private.

Teen users under 18 have the option to share their Character.AI stats with their parents or guardians in the app’s settings. by simply adding their email addresses and sending them an invitation to view them. Parents are not required to have a Character.AI account to view their teens weekly usage stats.

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Parental Insights comes amid a series of features added to address parental concerns about kids spending too much time on Character.AI and multiple lawsuits alleging the harmful content they’ve been exposed to on the service, ranging from inappropriate sexual content to messages encouraging self-harm. In response to those complaints, Character.AI updated the platform to move underage users to an AI model designed not to provide sensitive or suggestive content, detect and intervene if anything users do violates service guidelines, and give them notifications if they spent an hour on Character.AI. They even implemented a disclaimer in-chat and on their app marketplace listings to remind users that the AI characters they interact with are not real and that everything they say is made up.

Parents, if you see an email from Character.AI regarding an invitation from your teen to see their activity stats on a weekly basis in the coming days, consider that as a sign of trust. Their reports may grant you some peace of mind knowing they want your guidance on how they can use their time on the app wisely.