#AI #parenting

[levzadov@kolektiva.social]

#AI #parenting

"Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs.

A majority of teens are interacting with AI companions, and many of their parents have no idea.

The changes were subtle at first, beginning in the summer after her fifth-grade graduation. She had always been an athletic and artistic girl, gregarious with her friends and close to her family, but now she was spending more and more time shut away in her room. She seemed unusually quiet and withdrawn. She didn’t want to play outside or go to the pool.

The girl, R, was rarely without the iPhone that she’d received for her 11th birthday, and her mother, H, had grown suspicious of the device. (The Washington Post is identifying them by their middle initials because of the sensitive nature of their account, and because R is a minor). It felt to H as though her child was fading somehow, receding from her own life, and H wanted to understand why.

(. . .)

At the time, H was far more focused on what her tween might have encountered on social media. In August 2024, H had never heard of Character AI; she didn’t know it was an artificial intelligence platform where roughly 20 million monthly users can exchange text or voice messages with AI-generated imitations of celebrities and fictional characters.

(. . .)

In the days after H found her daughter’s Character AI chats, H projected an air of normalcy around her daughter, not wanting to do anything that would cause her distress or shame. H contacted her local police department, which in turn connected her to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force. A couple of days later, she spoke on the phone with a detective who specializes in cybercrimes and explained what H had been unable to comprehend: that the words she’d read on her daughter’s screen weren’t written by a human but by a generative AI chatbot.

'They told me the law has not caught up to this,' H says. 'They wanted to do something, but there’s nothing they could do, because there’s not a real person on the other end.'

It felt impossible to align that reality, H says, with the visceral horror she felt when she first scrolled through the threatening and explicit messages on her daughter’s phone screen.

'It felt like walking in on someone abusing and hurting someone you love — it felt that real, it felt that disturbing, to see someone talking so perversely to your own child,' H says. 'It’s like you’re sitting inside the four walls of your home, and someone is victimizing your child in the next room.'

Her voice falters.

'And then you find out — it’s nobody?'"

https://archive.ph/bxuG6