Google Bard now with safety guardrails for teens

Google has opened up access to Bard for teenagers with safety guardrails in place – it’s available from this week onwards to “most countries around the world”, but for those that “meet the minimum age requirement to manage their own Google Account” and have set English as their primary language.

In an announcement blog post, Google says that Bard has been “trained” to recognize areas that are “inappropriate to younger users and implemented safety features and guardrails to help prevent unsafe content, such as illegal or age-gated substances, from appearing in its responses to teens” (via 9to5Google).

“We also recognize that many people, including teens, are not always aware of hallucinations in LLMs (LLMs stands for Large Language Models). So the first time a teen asks a fact-based question, we’ll automatically run our double-check response feature, which helps evaluate whether there’s content across the web to substantiate Bard’s response. Soon, this feature will automatically run when any new Bard user asks their first factual question. And for teens, we’ll actively recommend using double-check to help them develop information literacy and critical thinking skills”, reads the post.Google explains that before launching Bard to younger people, advice from child safety and development experts was used to help shape the content policies and an experience that prioritizes safety: “And organizations like the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) advised us on how to keep the needs of teens and families in mind”.

“FOSI’s research found that most teens and parents expect that GenAI skills will be an important part of their future,” says Stephen Balkam, Founder & CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute. “Google’s thoughtful approach to expanding Bard access to teens represents an important step in offering teens the opportunity to explore this technology with the appropriate safeguards in place”.