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- Hacker News
- They should ban the over-18s too.by amiga386
- It makes no difference to their bottom line. After all, appealing to children over the age of 18 is where LLMs find their market.by hatefulheart
- If they are banning a large part of their current and future market, with competitors serving the space, how does it not affect their bottom line?by hackernewds
- They are not a profitable company at all. They only started monetizing this year and the customer base is not a fan of it at all.by red2awn
- Very nice. Just yesterday I wrote about the 13-18 age group using ChatGPT and how I think it should be disallowed (without guardian consent), this was in the context of suicide cases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733618
On a similar note, I was completing my application for YC Startup School / Co-Founder matching program. And when listing possible ideas for startups I straight out explicitly mentioned I'm not interested in pursuing AI ideas at the moment, AI features are fine, but not as the main pitch.
It feels like at least for me the bubble has popped, I have talked also recently about the way in which the bubble might pop would be due to legal liability collapse in the courts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727060
This added with the fact that AI was always a vague folk category of software, it's being used for robotics, NLP and fake images, I just don't think it's a real taxon.
Similar to the crypto buzz from the last season, the reputable parties will exit and stop associating, while the grifters and free-associating mercenaries will remain.
Even if you are completely selfish, it's not even hugely beneficial to be in the "AI" space, at least in my experience, customers come in with huge expectations, and non-huge budgets. Even if you sell your soul to implement a chatbot that will replace 911 operators, at this point the major actors have already done so, or not, and you are left with small companies that want to be able to fire 5 employees and will pay you 3 months of employee salary if you can get it done by vibe code completing their vibe coded prototype within a 2-3 deadline.
by TZubiri - If parental consent is all that's necessary then you might as well blanket allow it. I'm a parent and interacting with a lot of parents of young children, the vast majority of them can't be bothered to deal with whining or inconvenience. Which is why I see 8 year olds with cash app even though that's not allowed any many abandon or extremely weaken parental controls on basically every advice.
My personal favorite story is when I talk my youngest aunt about a videogame my cousin wanted. She said no absolutely not. Then proceeded to buy the game for ehr 10 year old. A game she was carded for. A game that has that it's M rated and has adult themes and whatnot on the box. She called me later in horror about how inappropriate this game I told her about 2 weeks earlier was. How could they make games like that for children she says about the game she was carded for because it's only for adults.
I use her as an example but that situation is a lot of parents. I personally think that it's not the government's place to say how much exposure I want to give my child to the internet, but I have rules and boundaries around that with my kid. Many of her friends have free access and and have always had it since toddlers. People say it's parents not being savvy, but honestly it's parents not caring. Parent controls have been around over 30 years and they have always been dead simple. But they do increase the whining in your life from your kids and that means if parents can allow it a high quantity will. I have no faith that a law will stop significantly more kids than no law. I know too many parents who allow their kids to do things they know are harmful to their kid because "I don't want them to feel left out" or they don't want to deal with whining.
by iteria - Honestly this needs to be standardised.
- Character.ai to go bankrupt.by Mr_Bees69
- I think ChatBots are not very helpful if you don't treat them with scrutiny. There should be a mandatory requirement of a disclaimer before interacting with all AI.by Sparkyte
- This is the only way. Tech companies cannot become like the police in many countries. The police in many countries are used as a "catch-all" function at the moment of, where they have to deal with the failure of other functions (parenting, community) exactly at the moment of (just-in time catch-all).
Your kid is on the fucking computer all day building an unhealthy relationship with essentially a computer game character. Step the fuck in. These companies absolutely have to make liability clear here. It's an 18+ product, watch your kids.
by ivape - Step in as parents or step in as the unabomber?by wagwang
- > This is the only way.
You're more optimistic than I am. Their announcement is virtue signaling at best. Nothing will come from this. Kids will figure out a way around their so-called detection mechanisms because if there were any false positives for adults they would lose adult customers _and_ kids customers.
- I thought that was like 75% of their user base. What do adults use this for?by moogly
- I'm interested in that question as well. Perhaps there is an adult user here on HN who can describe their use-case.by x187463
- Lots of threads in here saying this is just a "legal" protection move...
I'd like to believe that most actual people want to protect kids.
It's easy to write off corporations and forget that they are founded by real people and employ real people... some with kids of their own or with nieces or nephews etc, and some of them probably do really care.
Not saying character.ai is driven by that but I imagine the times they've been in the news were genuinely hard times to be working there...
- They (the leadership and the folks who left to Google) absolutely don’t give a shit about protecting kids. In fact most of America doesn’t give a shit about protecting kids (guns, SNAP, vaccines, the goddamn Epstein files).by ml-anon
- lol they business idea itself is very easy to degenerate for money so if Who created It didnt thought putting barriers to minors from the beggining the person is stupid or greedyby DuperPower
- Yeah they care so much they strictly limit what their own kids do with the technology. But push it on everyone else.by SoftTalker
- I mean, I think you're probably giving companies a _bit_ too much benefit of the doubt, on this particular issue. Here's another major chatbot peddler: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/15/meta-ai-c...
> An internal Meta policy document, seen by Reuters, showed the social media giant’s guidelines for its chatbots allowed the AI to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual”, generate false medical information, and assist users in arguing that Black people are “dumber than white people”
by rsynnott - I'm sure some of them care genuinly but I've interacted with corporations enough to know that the individual proclivities of the parts don't necessarily appear in the whole.
- Finally. CAI is notoriously shady with harvesting, selling, and making it difficult to remove data. How many kids have CAI's chatbots already seduced and had their intimate conversations sold to Google?by causal
- I suspect Google is the one pushing for this. C.ai has dramatically folded on two of its longest standing struggles in the last two months: underage users and intellectual property
In both cases they went nuclear in a way that implies they actually don't care if the current product survives as long as C.ai (read: Google) isn't exposed to the ongoing risk
by BoorishBears - Related:
Teen in love with chatbot killed himself – can the chatbot be held responsible?
- How is it possible to develop emotional connection to anyone with a goldfish memory? I'd be surprised if context size there is more than 50K tokens.by nopurpose
- "Going forward, it will use technology to detect underage users based on conversations and interactions on the platform, as well as information from any connected social media accounts"
Something tells me that this ain't gonna work. Kids and teens are more inventive than they probably realize.
by thw_9a83c - A model would also have to account for the emotionally stunted adults using an AI bf/gf service.
- Nah, you just have to have some prompt that unknowingly reveals that the user has ever engaged with Roblox in any way, which leads to an instant block.by LiquidSky
- Deterring kids is still valuable. A lot of them won’t bother with figuring out how to get around the automated detection.by alyxya
- I would expect that "based on conversations and interactions on the platform" would result in both false positives and false negatives, and that "information from any connected social media accounts" might cause additional problems (possibly including that some people being unable to get in at all, or being able to get in once and then unable to access for reasons that are not explained). (It won't affect me because I do not use it, but it might affect someone who does try to use it)
- They don't care: if they put in robust sounding guards and openly state "chatbots are not for kids", they can point to them in court if someone gets around itby BoorishBears