r/technology • u/WorldTravelerBoss • Jul 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/
21.3k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

57

u/hatemakingnames1 Jul 15 '26

You don't have to take away phones, you just have to enable the parental controls that were built into every single electronic device for the last decade or two

20

u/bgthigfist Jul 15 '26

Yeah I remember when my kids were starting middle school during the Obama years, some of their friends had iPhone and such. I got them cheap phones with keyboards so they could text and call but that was all. All computers in the house were desktops in the living room. That seemed to work pretty well.

I only found out years later that one of my sons friends was going on 4Chan through his Playstation and my son wad exposed to 2girls 1cup in 6th grade. So you can lock your kids down, but then you pretty much have to keep them away from everyone else, and that causes other problems with their development.

Honestly the best thing you can do is give kids guidance and try to encourage good behavior and help them to make good decisions themselves.

10

u/Diablo_Incarnate Jul 15 '26

I just took my 12 year old nephew on a trip and we got him a burner device in case he got lost. I set the child safety locks down to 4 year old and disabled safari and app store entirely. And still, almost every night when i took the phone back, he had found a new source of incredibly adult material.

Apple Music was the absolute worst, but he kept finding porn. "Youtube kids", app ads, and even just other kids' willing to text him the stuff I was trying to block elsewhere.

Child safety locks are garbage apparently and there's a significant amount of monitoring you need to do to make sure kids aren't stumbling across this stuff anyway. I can see how it can be hard to maintain with full time jobs, chores, and other responsibilities.

4

u/wehrmann_tx Jul 15 '26

You’ve never seen how shitty they design the parent controls. The big companies want your kids views so they do halfassed attempts to say they have controls. You can’t blacklist channels on YouTube, you can only filter by age rating on apps. Half the stuff I’d want to block would still get through.

The only true draconic way is to have every download require a parent intervention. Giving them no agency at all just makes them unable to make the right choices later. It’s the same thing you see with church kids the second they get freedom. They go off the deep end the other way.

-5

u/Logical_Mix_4627 Jul 15 '26

I grew up before apps on phones and didn’t even have the option to install my own apps on a non existent smart device.

And yet here I am as an adult fully able to make good decisions about what goes on my phone today.

Your argument is nonsense.