New regulations in China to ban AI companions for minors
The country wants to stop the erosion of real-world relationships, and is preventing tech companies from promoting virtual companions.
New regulations introduced in China will prevent tech companies from offering AI partners to minors, hoping to encourage more real-world relationships and less reliance on virtual companionships. The new laws will also limit AI relationships on a broader scale.
As per ABC News Australia, these regulations require platforms to limit usage on chatbots and prevent chatbots from encouraging emotional reliance. They are also required to step in if a user shows emotional distress. According to AI policy expert Matt Sheehan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, these new laws will hopefully push Chinese citizens towards more real-world engagements.
"Their main concerns are that these AI companions, AI chat bots that people form emotional relationships to, are going to have all kinds of potentially negative social impacts and that people are going to get addicted to them," Sheehan said.
Millions of social media users have protested the laws, as they're set to lose their companions. Users who have created friends, or AI bots of deceased relatives, or emotional partners, say they have lost key pillars of support in their lives. Most do not believe these AI relationships come at the cost of human interaction, but China's government would clearly disagree.
