These are Insights, a new Meta feature that lets you keep an eye on how your kids use AI on Messenger and Instagram.
Meta has released new tools to help parents learn more about how their teens use AI. This new feature comes at a time when young people are increasingly interacting with AI systems in their daily lives, and Meta aims to give families more control and peace of mind. To that end, the company has enhanced existing monitoring options on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, such as setting usage time limits or seeing who they've recently contacted, by adding a new tab called "Statistics."
How Meta Insights works
As Meta explains, the "Insights" feature appears within the parental control tools and is available in both the app and the website. In this section, parents can clearly and easily see the topics their children have discussed with Meta's AI over the past seven days. For example, topics related to school, entertainment, travel, or health might appear.
Each topic can be expanded to include more specific categories, such as fashion or nutrition within lifestyle, and so on. However, it's important to note that parents cannot read the entire conversation; they can only see the general topics. This allows for a better understanding of how AI is being used without infringing on teenagers' privacy. Even if AI deems a question inappropriate, that topic will still appear in the summary.
Meta has added expert-prepared guides to help parents talk to their children about artificial intelligence, aiming to open dialogues and better support teenagers in using these tools. The company, led by Zuckerberg, has also created a new AI Wellbeing Expert Council, which will contribute to improving safety and designing age-appropriate experiences for teenagers.
Meta is also working on new alerts that will let parents know if it sees conversations about sensitive topics like suicide or self-harm. These alerts are not yet available, though. Countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Brazil have already started using these new tools. Meta has also said that they will be available to everyone else in the world in the next few weeks.