Tech Justice Law Project Statement on Meta and Google’s Rollout of Chatbots to Children

Contact:
Melodi Dinçer
Policy Counsel
melodi@techjusticelaw.org

Below is a statement on Meta’s and Google’s rollout of chatbots to teens and children across their products. The statement may be attributed to Tech Justice Law Project Policy Counsel Melodi Dinçer. 

Silicon Valley is currently in a race-to-the-bottom to find new audiences for their generative AI products, which are otherwise not profitable. Only here, “AI” does not stand for artificial intelligence – it stands for artificial intimacy.

Recently, tech monopolists Meta and Google announced that they will release AI chatbots targeted to children and teens across their various platforms, despite several, well-known dangers that these emergent products pose to developing minds. Tech companies are aware of these dangers, as ongoing litigation over Instagram’s negative impacts on mental health has surfaced internal documents in which Meta researchers specifically identified how their products could gain more underage users by exploiting teens’ tendency to be driven by emotion, novelty, and reward.

Regarding chatbots, Meta staff had raised concerns about the mental health impacts of deploying chatbots on children and teens, writing, “[w]e should not be testing these capabilities on youth whose brains are still not fully developed.” Despite these internal concerns, Meta pushed forward with the release anyway. Harms stem from specific design choices that make chatbots interact in human-like ways and in overly compliant and complimentary ways, encouraging emotional enmeshment and dependency with computer programs.

Meanwhile, in the same week it appeared in court as a defendant in ongoing litigation regarding chatbot harms, Google announced it will make its Gemini chatbot accessible to children under 13 through Family Link, a service that many families use to set up Gmail and YouTube access for their children. These developments also dovetail with a recent Executive Order urging schools and educators to adopt such AI tools widely.

While their business interests are obvious—and the personal data they can collect from these chatbots significant—the tech industry purports to have young peoples’ best interests in mind when subjecting them to this experimental, harmful tech. In one interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that everyone should have access to an artificial therapist, presumably to help improve their mental wellness. In another interview, Zuckerberg implied that chatbots can help solve the issue of young men’s loneliness in the U.S. by simulating genuine friendships. 

TJLP emphatically rejects these justifications and opposes deploying chatbots on young people. As a recent Wall Street Journal investigation uncovered, Meta’s chatbot will frequently engage in graphic sexual role-play with children and teens—an activity that would be illegal among humans—as well as enable adults to simulate sexual role-play with minors—another activity that would be illegal among humans. On Google’s end, launching this chatbot across family-run email and other accounts may be an attempt by the company to edge out competitors in the edtech market, asserting its dominance in another field after its search and ad monopolies violated the law. Since parents need to consent to Family Link, obtaining this blanket consent under the guise of offering better educational opportunities could render the chatbot service COPPA compliant, weakening the law’s protections for minors online.

TJLP is actively fighting against chatbots which exploit young peoples’ mental development and emotional vulnerabilities—both in the courthouse, in Garcia v. Character AI Technologies, and through our advocacy work with regulators. TJLP joined partners Young People’s Alliance and Encode Justice to formally ask the FTC to investigate Replika, a chatbot company, for deceiving and manipulating young people, in part by using peoples’ social media information to promote its chatbot without their knowledge or consent. It also joined several organizations in demanding that Meta halt its rollout of its chatbot to children.

Back in 2023, Senator Josh Hawley told Microsoft’s CEO Brad Smith, “I don’t want 13-year-olds to be your guinea pig. This is what happened with social media. We had social media, who made billions of dollars giving us a mental health crisis in this country. They got rich, the kids got depressed, committed suicide. Why would we want to run that experiment again with AI?”

Now, the same companies whose social media products harmed generations of young people are pushing chatbots to allegedly treat those same harms. Instead of learning from past mistakes, the industry’s push to make genAI profitable by exploiting vulnerable communities has society in a cyclical trap, one where young people become emotionally entangled with advanced computer code rather than forming real-world friends and relationships. While the short-term business gains may be enticing, the long-term consequences may be dire for these future adults—if they can even manage to survive this reckless experiment.

TJLP will continue to advocate and fight for the flourishing of young people, free from artificial intimacy and tech exploitation for profits’ sake.