Like many social media platforms, Snapchat has also jumped on the AI bandwagon with its My AI chatbot.
Given that one of Snapchat's largest demographics is 13- to 17-year-olds, some parents might be rightly wondering if they have any control over their teenagers' interactions with AI.
After all, last year, Snapchat's AI bot malfunctioned and posted a live update on people's profiles, leading some to question whether the tech had become sentient.
As part of the platform's latest updates to parental controls, Snapchat bosses have now enabled features that let parents restrict their kids' abilities to communicate with My AI.
This adds to already existing safeguards in the AI settings that protect against inappropriate or harmful responses and misuse of service.
So how can concerned parents limit their kids' interactions with My AI? Let's find out.
Snapchat's commitment to parental controls
In 2022, Snapchat launched the Family Center to let parents see who their teens communicate with on the platform.
This setting allows users to report their concerns confidentially and manage content controls.
Expanding on this feature, Snapchat has now rolled out a selection of features to enable more visibility for parents.
This includes access to their kids' safety and privacy settings for their Snapchat stories, location, and contact.
A press release from Snapchat said: "We worked closely with families and online safety experts to develop Family Center, and their expertise, insights and feedback directly informed the features announced today. We look forward to furthering those collaborations and continuing to make Snapchat a fun and safe environment for our entire community."
How to restrict Snapchat's AI chatbot
Parents can now disable My AI interactions on their teens' platforms.
To do this you'll need first to access the Family Center on their Snapchat App.
To access the Family Center, the parent will need to send a friend request to their teen and get them to accept an invite to the Family Center.
Once that's set up, you are able to have a better oversight of your young person's Snapchat usage.
Parents can access the Family Center directly from their Snapchat profile by heading to the Bitmoji icon and searching terms such as "family" or "safety". You can equally find the Family Center by heading to the app's settings page.
Once in the Family Center, you can view your teenager's interactions with My AI in the past seven days.
There's a slider next to the tab that you can swipe to turn off My AI.
A pop-up screen will appear in which you need to press "disable". It should then show in the profile as being turned off.
Snapchat has shared the graphic below to help you better understand how to turn it off.
