In October, the company previewed parental controls for AI characters<\/a>, allowing parents and guardians to monitor topics and block access to certain characters. Meta said parents would be able to completely turn off chats with AI characters. These features were set to release this year, but the company is now turning off AI characters altogether for teens while it updates the AI characters to a newer version.<\/p>\n Meta said that it heard from parents that they wanted more insights and control over their teens\u2019 interactions with AI characters, which is why it decided to make these changes.<\/p>\n The company has been cracking down on teens\u2019 access to AI content in its apps. Also in October, Meta rolled out parental control features<\/a> on Instagram, focusing on tailoring the teen experience of interacting with AI on its apps. These features, which were inspired by the PG-13 movie rating, restricted teen access to certain topics like extreme violence, nudity, and graphic drug use.<\/p>\n \u201cStarting in the coming weeks, teens will no longer be able to access AI characters across our apps until the updated experience is ready. This will apply to anyone who has given us a teen birthday, as well as people who claim to be adults but who we suspect are teens based on our age prediction technology,\u201d the company said in an updated blog post. <\/p>\n Meta added that when it rolls out the new AI characters, they will have built-in parental controls. The company said that the new characters will give age-appropriate responses and will stick to topics like education, sport, and hobbies.<\/p>\n Social media companies are under heavy scrutiny from regulators. Apart from the aforementioned case in New Mexico, Meta is also facing a trial next week<\/a>, where the platform is accused of causing social media addiction. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the witness stand in that case once the trial begins.<\/p>\n Besides social platforms, AI companies have had to modify their experience for teens after facing lawsuits alleging to play a part in aiding self-harm. In October, Character.AI, the startup that allows users to chat with various AI avatars, disallowed open-ended conversations with chatbots for users who were under 18<\/a>. In November, the startup said it would build interactive stories for kids<\/a>. In the last few months, OpenAI added new teen safety rules for ChatGPT<\/a> and started predicting a user\u2019s age to apply content restrictions<\/a>.<\/p>\n Correction: This post was updated to clarify the new version of AI characters will be accessible to everyone, not just teens, when it launches. It will include parental controls. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta today said that it is pausing teens\u2019 access to its AI characters globally across all its apps.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,1017,898,20549,111,139,69,145,60925],"class_list":{"0":"post-248320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-exclusive","12":"tag-meta","13":"tag-meta-ai","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-teen-safety"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Meta-AI-Controls_Visual2-1.jpeg\")
Meta\u2019s previously previewed controls around AI characters.Image Credits:Meta<\/p>\n