New Delhi: Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety feature for the mental safety of teenagers and prevention of self-harm. This new tool will work together with ‘Meta AI’. If a teen shares sensitive topics like suicide or self-harm during a conversation with the Meta AI chatbot, this feature will immediately activate and send an alert to parents.
Balancing privacy and security
Many times teenagers consider AI chatbot as their friend and start sharing their problems with it. Keeping this in mind, Meta has designed this feature in such a way that along with the safety of children, their privacy is also maintained.
Chat Scanning and Review: The AI system scans the conversations between teenagers and the chatbot. If any critical situation is detected, it is investigated by the team before sending the alert.
Limited Information Sharing: Parents will only be given alerts and expert guidance to deal with the situation, they will not be shown the child’s entire personal chat.
In which countries was this facility started?
This new safety feature of Meta has been made live in America, Britain, Australia and Canada. To avail this feature, parents will have to use Instagram Parental Supervision. The company aims to roll it out in other countries of the world including India by the end of this year. Amidst the increasing engagement with AI chatbots in the digital era, this initiative of Meta will prove helpful in alerting parents in time.
Emergency services will also help
The company has also clarified that it is working on another advanced security feature. Under this, if during the interaction with Meta AI it is found that a person, whether a teenager or an adult, is at serious risk of self-harm or suicide, emergency services will be contacted directly. According to META, more than 19,000 such cases were referred to security agencies around the world last year, allowing first responders to provide timely assistance to those at risk.
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