What happens when you mix kids, social media, and AI?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

On our new series, The Infinite Scroll, we're looking at the rules and risks of kids using social media.

Today, how artificial intelligence is increasingly showing up on these platforms in the form of chatbots, digital characters you can text or talk with, sometimes out loud.

I spoke about this with Mittali Jane, who leads the tech justice law project.

Her organization is involved in a lawsuit against character AI, where users can interact with

these bots. And just a warning, this conversation does mention suicide.

We've seen this both integrated into larger social media apps, but we've also seen these apps as kind of tech startups

that have been supported by bigger tech.

And in both cases, what is fascinating about this area

and quite dangerous, quite concerning as well,

is that we see this shift from what we know, what we've always understood to be the

attention economy in social media to this shift to a intimacy economy or relationship economy,

where these apps are really being positioned and represented as being the tech response to solve or overcome the human

condition of loneliness. So I want to ask more about that in just a second. So in preparing for

this interview, I actually created an AI chat bot on Instagram and I asked it what questions I should

ask you about kids and social media

and AI. And I'm going to play you a little bit of what it said. Mind racing already. Three questions

popped into my head instantly. One, how exactly do AI algorithms target kids online? Two, what's the

worst psychological impact they've seen so far?

Three, can parents even protect their kids from this stuff? Want me to elaborate on why I chose these?

Yeah, what would you say is your top question? Definitely the first one. How exactly do AI algorithms target kids online?

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