Teens Are Saying Tearful Goodbyes to Their AI Companions (www.wsj.com)

Character.AI recently told its under-18 customers that they will soon lose access to ongoing chat interactions with its role-playing characters — a change that left some teens, like 13‑year‑old Olga López, upset about saying goodbye to digital companions they’d grown attached to. The notification affects features that let users maintain persistent conversations with conversational agents (including romantic role play), and highlights how quickly product decisions can disrupt parasocial relationships formed with AI. For the AI/ML community this raises practical and ethical questions about age gating, safety, and personalization. Removing persistent chat access likely limits model memory and user‑specific fine‑tuning, reduces long-term interaction data, and forces trade‑offs between personalization and content-moderation/legal compliance (e.g., protections for minors). It also spotlights design challenges: how to build age‑appropriate personas, apply contextual filters without destroying engagement, and document dataset shifts when platforms curtail classes of interactions. Researchers and builders will need clearer best practices for consent, data retention, and safeguards that balance user welfare with model utility — or else face sudden policy changes that fragment training data and user experiences.