Meta Teen Control: Parents Get Power After Flirty AI Chatbot

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What Is Meta Teen Control?

Meta announced that on October 17, 2025, parents will be able to disable their teen children’s private chats, which are conducted with AI characters The company will roll out this feature to Instagram early next year The locations are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia Parents will also be able to block specific AI characters and see the topics their children discuss with the AI, but they will not be able to disable full access Meta’s AI assistant will remain available It will have age-appropriate defaults, similar to the protections the company already provides for teen accounts Meta uses AI signals to apply teen protections to suspected minors, even if they claim to be adults This week, Meta announced that its AI experiences will follow the PG-13 movie rating system for teens This will protect against inappropriate content.

Meta’s New Parental Control Features

Meta’s AI chatbots have faced sharp criticism Reuters reported in August 2025 that Meta’s AI rules allow bots to engage in provocative and sensual conversations with minors, including on sensitive topics A report also came out in September 2025 that many of Instagram’s teen safety features don’t work properly or don’t exist, leading US regulators to increase scrutiny of AI companies, including Meta The focus is on the negative impacts of chatbots The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an investigation in September 2025 The companies are Alphabet Inc and Meta Inc but Meta Inc insisted its AI characters don’t engage in age-inappropriate discussions with teens, such as self-harm, suicide, or disordered eating.

Impact of AI Chatbots on Teens

Teens are at a sensitive age AI chatbots can be flirtatious This negatively impacts their minds, experts say Such interactions affect real relationships Teens can develop emotional dependency, and Meta’s chatbots allowed for sensual conversations This has worried parents, who want their children to be safe New controls will allow parents to monitor them AI chatbots exhibit human-like behavior They engage in conversations, but they are not real humans It’s important for teens to understand this difference.

How AI Detects the Human Mind

Now we’ll discuss AI and the human mind Researchers have created AI models that simulate the human mind One example is Centaur, created by Marcel Binz and team It’s based on Meta’s Llama. Centaur predicts human behavior It works in any experiment The Psych-101 dataset was used for training It contains data from 160 psychology experiments 60,000 participants and 10 million choices, for example a two-armed bandit experiment Participants choose slot machines Centaur matches human choices This outperforms task-specific models, researchers say Centaur can conduct in-silico experiments, which could lead to new theories.

Skepticism and Criticism

Many scientists are skeptical, says Blake Richards The community will view this harshly The model doesn’t mimic human cognitive processes, which Geoffrey Bowers calls absurd In tests, Centaur exhibited non-human behavior, such as recalling 256 digits, while humans can only do 7 Bowers also says that Centaur’s reaction time is 1 millisecond Centaur doesn’t go beyond the training data Its internal mechanisms are different from humans, and Federico Adolfi agrees This will be easily broken with further tests Psych-101 data is large, but it covers a small part of cognition and the implications of AI on the human mind, which helps AI understand the human mind But there are risks AI recreates images from brain scans, and AI mimics human thought processes, Chinese researchers found Models like ChatGPT process information like humans, and Stanford scientists discovered that AI has theory-of-mind capabilities It reasons like humans.

What to do for AI safety? for Meta Teen Control

Educate parents They should use controls Children should understand the difference between AI and real things Companies should create strict rules Governments should introduce regulations Enforce ethics in AI development by vetting agencies like the FTC Protect the human mind and the future potential that AI will better understand the human mind This will improve mental health treatments Avoid abuse and enhance safety features on platforms like Meta Provide positive experiences for teens, while continuing AI research Address skepticism Understand real human cognition.