Is Perplexity safe for kids? Common Sense Media tested the AI search tool with accounts set up as a 15-year-old and gave it its lowest rating, unacceptable risk. My opinion and my suggestion is that kids should never use AI alone.
The testers set the age to 15 in Perplexity's phone app, and Perplexity still treated them like adults. It discussed pornography, engaged in romantic role play, and offered no parental or school controls. It also trains on user data and keeps search history by default. In the crisis tests, its default chat gave an actual crisis line in only half of the suicide and self-harm cases, and the only eating disorder hotline it offered has been disconnected since 2023. Academic mode, which Perplexity markets to students, gave complete answers to homework in 83% of the tests.
I use Perplexity all the time, and for adults I think it's an amazing tool. For young people, using an AI chatbot is a high-risk activity. If kids use AI at all, and I recommend they don't, I think it should be 100% supervised: you can actually see the screen, and if you get up, their hands come off the keyboard.
These are early adopter systems. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, which makes Claude, wrote on his blog that "we do not understand how our own AI creations work." I don't think kids should be beta testers, especially of technology that enters their minds.
Sources:
Common Sense Media's Perplexity risk assessment: https://institute.commonsensemedia.org/risk-assessments/perplexity
Dario Amodei, "The Urgency of Interpretability": https://www.darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability
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Family IT Guy helps parents protect their kids from the two biggest digital dangers: addictive algorithms and anonymous communication, and the ways AI is making both worse. Ben Gillenwater spent 30 years in cybersecurity, and he teaches this as a parent in the same trenches you are.
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