Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's Director of Business and Industry, Zoe Schiffer.

Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week,

including reactions to the death of right-wing media figure Charlie Kirk and the content cancellations that have happened as a result of that. I'm joined today by our senior culture editor, Manisha Krishna-Krish.

Manisha, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Hi, Zoe. So, Manisha, our first story this week is about

open AI making this announcement about new teen safety features for chatGBT.

This is part of an ongoing effort to respond to concerns about how minors engage with chatbots.

We reported this week that the company is building out an age prediction system that it says can

identify if someone is under the age of 18 and reroute them to an age

appropriate system. A potential scenario that they outlined in the blog post about this was if the

system detects that a user is considering suicide or self-harm, it'll contact the user's parents.

And if the parents are unreachable, it might contact the authorities. This comes at a moment

when we've seen tons and tons of headlines about people dying by suicide or committing

acts of violence after engaging in pretty lengthy conversations with AI chatbots. So I'm curious what

you make of it. So I think it's kind of important to contextualize this because this is

happening at a time where we're seeing age verification being applied to a range of industries

from porn to video games and companies are going about it in different ways. And while I think

there obviously is a lot to be concerned about with young people having unfettered access to chat GBT, I think these efforts always raise a lot of questions, like how is age going to be verified? Where's that data going to be stored? Even like the idea of something inappropriate flagging someone's parents or the authorities, what is appropriate?

Right.

I can definitely see why suicide would be something that you'd want to flag.

But maybe there's other things that the authorities or someone's parents may not be helpful

in every situation.

And I guess I'm thinking more about when we go into young people's exploration

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