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Character.ai to bar children under 18 from using its chatbots

93 points by geox

by thw_9a83c

8 subcomments

"Going forward, it will use technology to detect underage users based on conversations and interactions on the platform, as well as information from any connected social media accounts"
Something tells me that this ain't gonna work. Kids and teens are more inventive than they probably realize.

by ChrisArchitect

1 subcomments

Related:
Teen in love with chatbot killed himself – can the chatbot be held responsible?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726556

by causal

1 subcomments

Finally. CAI is notoriously shady with harvesting, selling, and making it difficult to remove data. How many kids have CAI's chatbots already seduced and had their intimate conversations sold to Google?

by harrisonjackson

5 subcomments

Lots of threads in here saying this is just a "legal" protection move...
I'd like to believe that most actual people want to protect kids.
It's easy to write off corporations and forget that they are founded by real people and employ real people... some with kids of their own or with nieces or nephews etc, and some of them probably do really care.
Not saying character.ai is driven by that but I imagine the times they've been in the news were genuinely hard times to be working there...

by moogly

1 subcomments

I thought that was like 75% of their user base. What do adults use this for?

by ivape

2 subcomments

This is the only way. Tech companies cannot become like the police in many countries. The police in many countries are used as a "catch-all" function at the moment of, where they have to deal with the failure of other functions (parenting, community) exactly at the moment of (just-in time catch-all).
Your kid is on the fucking computer all day building an unhealthy relationship with essentially a computer game character. Step the fuck in. These companies absolutely have to make liability clear here. It's an 18+ product, watch your kids.

by Sparkyte

0 subcomment

I think ChatBots are not very helpful if you don't treat them with scrutiny. There should be a mandatory requirement of a disclaimer before interacting with all AI.

by Mr_Bees69

0 subcomment

Character.ai to go bankrupt.

by gooseWithFood20

0 subcomment

Honestly this needs to be standardised.

by TZubiri

1 subcomments

Very nice. Just yesterday I wrote about the 13-18 age group using ChatGPT and how I think it should be disallowed (without guardian consent), this was in the context of suicide cases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733618
On a similar note, I was completing my application for YC Startup School / Co-Founder matching program. And when listing possible ideas for startups I straight out explicitly mentioned I'm not interested in pursuing AI ideas at the moment, AI features are fine, but not as the main pitch.
It feels like at least for me the bubble has popped, I have talked also recently about the way in which the bubble might pop would be due to legal liability collapse in the courts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727060
This added with the fact that AI was always a vague folk category of software, it's being used for robotics, NLP and fake images, I just don't think it's a real taxon.
Similar to the crypto buzz from the last season, the reputable parties will exit and stop associating, while the grifters and free-associating mercenaries will remain.
Even if you are completely selfish, it's not even hugely beneficial to be in the "AI" space, at least in my experience, customers come in with huge expectations, and non-huge budgets. Even if you sell your soul to implement a chatbot that will replace 911 operators, at this point the major actors have already done so, or not, and you are left with small companies that want to be able to fire 5 employees and will pay you 3 months of employee salary if you can get it done by vibe code completing their vibe coded prototype within a 2-3 deadline.

by hatefulheart

2 subcomments

It makes no difference to their bottom line. After all, appealing to children over the age of 18 is where LLMs find their market.

by amiga386

0 subcomment

They should ban the over-18s too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67012224

by BatteryMountain

7 subcomments

How about we just enact a law that state children aren't allowed online, not allowed to interact with interative software (like ai, user generated content). Make the parents responsible, not companies.

by empath75

0 subcomment

There is nothing about character.ai that would be appealing for more than 30 minutes to anybody that isn't suffering from some kind of acute mental health crisis. They should shut the whole thing down. That is a cool demo that should have never been made into a product.

by alyxya

0 subcomment

I worry that all this does is reduce future liability issues and make those users use another chatbot instead. I trust character.ai more than other chatbots for safety.
> [Dr. Nina Vasan] said the company should work with child psychologists and psychiatrists to understand how suddenly losing access to A.I. companions would affect young users.
I hope there’s a more gradual transition here for those users. AI companions are often far more available than other people, so it’s easy to talk more and get more attached to them. This restriction may end up being a net negative to affected users.

by Edmond

3 subcomments

There is a correct way to do age verification (and information verification in general) that supports strong privacy and makes it difficult to evade:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44723418
It is also highly compatible with the internet both in terms of technical/performance scalability and utility scalability (you can use it for just about any information verification need in any kind of application).