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An Update On Changes to Our Under-18 Experience

An Update On Changes to Our Under-18 Experience

As we announced on October 29th, we will begin removing open-ended chat for under-18 users next week. We know this is a significant change for these users, so we wanted to provide everyone – teens, parents, and other stakeholders – with more information on how this is being rolled out. 

Our Approach 

Since our announcement, we have received input on the upcoming changes from our safety partners, like ConnectSafely, who have deep expertise in teen online safety. We have worked with a wide range of experts and have also initiated a new partnership with Koko – more on them below – to support our long-term efforts to enhance user wellbeing. We are doing our best to handle this product change in the best possible way for our users, and are working closely with our partners every step of the way.

Below, we walk through what’s been happening to date, and then we provide more details on how our product change will be rolled out with user safety in mind.

What’s Been Happening

  • Chat Limits: Since late October, we have been limiting teens’ open-ended chat to two hours per day, and we have gradually reduced the limit to one hour per day in subsequent weeks for users in the US. 
  • Age Assurance: We have already begun rolling out our new age assurance technology in the US, and that rollout will continue globally in the near future. 
  • Parent Notifications: For teens who signed up for Parental Insights, we sent emails to let their parents know that this transition is coming. We will also notify parents when the switch has been made to the new experience. 
  • Resources: To help users with this change, we assembled and provided a list of resources they can turn to, which includes creative and supportive spaces where they can relax, continue to express their creativity, or connect with others HERE. 
  • In-Line Notifications: Using in-app/in-web pop-ups, we have been regularly reminding our under-18 users that we will soon deprecate open-ended chat, and we’ve been showing them in these notifications where they can find the resources list above.
  • Partnership with Koko: We’ve partnered with Koko, a nonprofit providing free, self-guided emotional support tools for young people directly on platforms. Koko's services for teen users are included in our larger resource page. We are also working to integrate Koko’s services directly into our product to identify high-risk content and provide easy-to-access resources to users at the chat level. 
  • Partnership with ThroughLine: We’ve also partnered with ThroughLine, who will help us offer a thoughtful off-boarding experience for users.  ThroughLine’s integration will help users reflect on how they used open-ended chat, explore alternatives that align with their needs, and connect with relevant, trusted, and accessible resources. In addition, we’re integrating ThroughLine’s verified helpline network—1,500 services across 170 countries, many of which specifically serve teens—into Character.AI experiences.

What’s Next

Starting on Monday, November 24, we will begin removing open-ended chat for under-18 users in the US, with other markets following in short order. 

We are taking a mindful approach to removing open-ended chat and aligning on the best possible set of protocols to minimize the disruption to our under-18 users: 

  • We are proactively removing users’ ability to chat in two stages, which is consistent with the recommendations we’ve received from third-party experts. 
  • For a first group of under-18 users, we will begin deprecating open-ended chat on November 24. This change will roll out to these users over a period of days. All of these users will have access to the creative and supportive resources our team has assembled. 
  • For a second group of users, we will deprecate open-ended chat weeks after the first group. During those weeks, these users will remain in our current limited under-18 chat experience – maximum one hour per day. We will give these users at least two weeks’ notice of the chat deprecation date for their group.
  • Our goal is to make sure that both teens and their parents have access to resources to help them process this change. We recognize that this may be a significant change for some of our teen users, and therefore, we want to be as cautious as possible in this transition. 

Beyond Chat

We are committed to offboarding teens using open-ended chat as thoughtfully as possible. But as we’ve said before, that doesn’t mean teens won’t be able to find fun experiences on Character! We have been hard at work building the new under-18 experience around our non-chat features like interactive Feed, Imagine, Avatar FX, and Streams. And we’re also working on new experiences for our under-18 users, which we’ll be announcing soon.

We believe that the future of entertainment AI is multi-modal. While there are so many ways to exercise creativity and build new worlds beyond chat already, we’ll keep building fun experiences for teen users going forward. More to come soon!