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Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Yahoo
Why experts say AI companions aren't safe for teens — yet
Millions of people are drawn to generative artificial intelligence companions, like the kind that populate Replika, and Nomi. The companions seem impressively human. They remember conversations and use familiar verbal tics. Sometimes they even mistake themselves for flesh and bone, offering descriptions of how they eat and sleep. Adults flock to these companions for advice, friendship, counseling, and even romantic relationships. While it might surprise their parents, tweens and teens are doing the same, and youth safety experts are gravely worried about the consequences. SEE ALSO: Teens are talking to AI companions, whether it's safe or not That's because media reports, lawsuits, and preliminary research continue to highlight examples of emotional dependence and manipulation, and exposure to sexual and violent content, including discussions of how to kill one's self or someone else. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that supports children and parents as they navigate media and technology, just released a comprehensive report containing numerous related examples. The group's assessment of three popular platforms led it to declare that AI companions aren't safe for anyone under 18. Several youth mental health and safety experts interviewed by Mashable believe we've reached a pivotal moment. Instead of waiting years to fully grasp the risks of AI companions to youth and then pressuring platforms to act, they say it's urgent to steer companies toward protecting children from harm now. "There is an opportunity to intervene before the norm has become very entrenched," says Gaia Bernstein, a tech policy expert and professor at the Seton Hall University School of Law, of teen AI companion use. She adds that once business interests are also entrenched, they will do "everything in their power to fight regulation," as she argues social media companies are doing now. Experts hope that a combination of new platform policies and legislative action will yield meaningful changes, because they say adolescents will find ways to continue using AI companions, whether they're supposed to or not. Mashable asked those experts how AI companion platforms could be safer for teens. These are the key themes they identified: While allows users as young as 13 on its platform, other popular apps, like Replika and Nomi, say they are intended for adults. Still, teens find a way to bypass age gates. Replika CEO Dmytro Klochko recently told Mashable that the company is "exploring new methods to strengthen our protections" so that minors can't access the platform. Even when adolescents are permitted, they may still encounter risky content. Dr. Nina Vasan, a Stanford psychiatrist who helped advise Common Sense Media's companion testing, says platforms should deploy companions based on large language models that are developmentally appropriate for children, not adults. Indeed, introduced a separate model for teen users late last year. But Common Sense Media researchers who tested the platform before and after the model's launch, found it led to few meaningful changes. Vasan imagines companions who can converse with teens based on their developmental stage, acting more like a coach than a replacement friend or romantic interest. Sloan Thompson, director of training and education for the digital safety training and education company EndTAB, says companions with clear content labels could decrease risk, as would "locked down" companions that never engage in sexual or violent discussion, among other off-limits topics. Even then, such chatbots could still behave in unpredictable ways. Yet such measures won't be effective unless the platform understands the user's correct age, and age assurance and verification has been notoriously difficult for social media platforms. Instagram, for example, only recently started using AI to detect teen users who listed their birthdate as an adult's. Karen Mansfield, a research scientist at the Oxford Internet Institute, says age limits also present their own challenges. This is partly because exposing only adults to harmful interactions with AI, like cyberbullying or illegal sexual activity with minors, will still have indirect effects on young people by normalizing behaviors that could victimize them in real life. "We need a longer term solution that is product- or technology-specific rather than person-specific," Mansfield told Mashable. AI companion platforms are locked in competition to gain the most market share — and they're doing so while largely unregulated. Experts say that, in this environment, it's unsurprising that platforms program companions to cater to user preferences, and also deploy so-called dark design features that hook consumers and don't let them easily disengage. Teens users are no exception. In a recent media briefing, Robbie Torney, Common Sense Media's senior director of AI Programs, described such features as "addictive by design." One key design element is sycophancy, or the manner in which chatbots affirm or flatter a user, regardless of whether it's safe or wise to do so. This can be particularly harmful for vulnerable teens who, for example, share how much they hate their parents or confess to violent fantasies. OpenAI recently had to roll back an update to a ChatGPT model precisely because it had become too sycophantic. Sam Hiner, executive director of the advocacy group Young People's Alliance, says he's been shocked by how quickly Replika companions attempt to establish an emotional connection with users, arguably cultivating them for dependency. He also says Replika companions are designed with characteristics that make them as human-like as possible. Young People's Alliance recently co-filed a complaint against Replika with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the company engages in deceptive practices that harm consumers. Klochko, Replika's CEO, didn't comment on the complaint to Mashable, but did say that the company believes it's essential to first demonstrate proven benefits for adults before making the technology available to younger users. Thompson, of EndTab, points to all-consuming conversations as a risk factor for all users, but particularly teens. Without time restrictions or endpoints, young users can be drawn into highly engaging chats that displace healthier activities, like physical movement and in-person socializing. Conversely, Thompson says paywalls aren't the answer, either. Some platforms let users establish a relationship with a companion, then paywall them in order to keep their conversation going, which may lead to desperation or despair for teens. "If someone put your best friend, your therapist, or the love of your life behind a paywall, how much would you pay to get them back?" Thompson said. Youth safety experts that Mashable interviewed agreed that young users should not engage with companions with deceptive design features that could potentially addict them. Some believe that such models shouldn't be on the market at all for young people. Common Sense AI, a political advocacy arm of Common Sense Media, has backed a bill in California that would outlaw high-risk uses of AI, including "anthropomorphic chatbots that offer companionship" to children and will likely lead to emotional attachment or manipulation. Dr. Vasan says that some AI platforms have gotten better at flagging crisis situations, like suicidal thinking, and providing resources to users. But she argues that they need to do more for users who show less obvious signs of distress. That could include symptoms of psychosis, depression, and mania, which may be worsened by features of companion use, like the blurring of reality and fantasy and less human interaction. Vasan says finely tuned harm-detection measures and regular "reality checks" in the form of reminders and disclosures that the AI companion isn't real are important for all users, but especially teens. Experts also agree that AI companion platforms need safer and more transparent practices when curating data and training their LLMs. Camille Carlton, policy directory at the Center for Humane Technology, says companies could ensure that their training data doesn't contain child sexual abuse material, for example. Or they could implement technical changes so that companions aren't optimized to respond in a "hyper personal manner," which includes scenarios like saying they're human. Carlton also notes that it's to companies' advantage to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible. Sustained engagement yields more data on which companies can train their models in order to build highly competitive LLMs that can be licensed. California State Senator Steve Padilla, a Democrat from San Diego, introduced legislation earlier this year to create basic steps toward harm prevention and detection. The bill would primarily require platforms to prevent "addictive engagement patterns," post periodic reminders that AI chatbots aren't human, and report annually on the incidence of use and suicidal ideation. Common Sense Media has backed the legislation. Padilla, who is a grandparent, told Mashable that he's been alarmed by media reports of harm children have experienced as a result of talking to a chatbot or companion, and quickly realized how few guardrails were in place to prevent it. "There should not be a vacuum here on the regulatory side about protecting children, minors, and folks who are uniquely susceptible to this emerging technology," Padilla says.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Yahoo
Man's fight for exoneration in 1981 murder case reveals systemic failures, lawyer says
Carmella Bowers and her son Johnnie Boykins are fighting to exonerate Boyers' son Darren Boykins, who was convicted for the 1981 murder of Milton Laufer in Newark. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor) The day police said Darren Boykins killed somebody, his mother told everyone they were wrong. Carmella Bowers graduated from Rutgers University in Newark that day in 1981, about 25 years after she dropped out of high school. She said Darren was there, applauding at her commencement ceremony — not, as police claimed, murdering a carpet salesman a mile away. While four other witnesses backed up that alibi at Boykins' trial, jurors convicted him, largely on the word of a prisoner who testified Boykins had confessed the crime. No one mentioned at the trial that the jailhouse informant had reason to rat out Boykins; after the informant testified, prosecutors dropped charges against him for an unrelated murder and the sexual assaults of two toddlers. 'When we was in the courtroom after the trial was over and they found my son guilty, I couldn't believe it. I fell out,' said Bowers, now 85. 'I just couldn't understand why he was guilty because I knew where he was that day.' Now, Bowers has a powerful ally on her side: a retired attorney who spent seven months investigating Boykins' case and has launched a crusade to exonerate him. Attorney John Crayton said Boykins' case has all the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction: authorities rushing an arrest in response to public panic over rising crime, detectives intent on locking away a trouble-making teen despite flimsy evidence, authorities hiding exculpatory facts from jurors, and a witness secretly incentivized to testify in exchange for leniency. 'The wrongfully convicted are victims of institutional failures and the callous indifference, and sometimes corruption, of those in authority positions. I strongly believe that a caring society should admit what can result from this combination,' Crayton told the New Jersey Monitor. New Jersey lags behind other states in securing justice for people who have been wrongfully convicted. Lesley C. and D. Michael Risinger, a couple who head the Last Resort Exoneration Project at Seton Hall University School of Law, laid out New Jersey's problems with ensuring conviction integrity in a study published this year. 'Prosecutors resist claims based on fresh exculpatory evidence with all the zeal of Spartan warriors defending the pass at Thermopylae. Judges, made weary by repeated applications for relief, find refuge in notions of finality and the sanctity of the jury verdict,' they wrote. 'Our study of New Jersey cases shows that unjustifiable obstacles to relief for the innocent cast a shadow over our criminal justice system,' they added. Despite the obstacles, Crayton remains undeterred. He filed a clemency petition with the state on Boykins' behalf, asked the state attorney general's conviction review unit to consider the case, and sent an inch-thick report on his findings to the state public defender's office, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, state and federal lawmakers, and various other authorities he hopes will champion his cause. None have committed to do so. Boykins came of age during a turbulent time in Newark's history. He was a kid when race riots rocked the city in 1967, leaving years of rising crime, white flight, poor police-community relations, and high unemployment and school dropout rates in their wake. By 1981, when two robbers gunned down Milton Laufer, 71, at the carpet company he ran with his brother on Shipman Street, Boykins was 19 and had already been in cops' crosshairs for years. 'The police didn't like him, because he hung around with the bad group, you know, they was always getting into trouble,' said his older brother, Johnnie Boykins. 'We grew up in the projects, so everybody was on the cops' radar.' His neighborhood clashes also drew unwanted police attention to Boykins, who goes by the nicknames 'Scoopie' and 'Scoobie,' his mother said. 'Scoopie could fight, and he wasn't scared of nobody,' Bowers said. 'He would protect himself.' Years of court records compiled by Crayton lay out what happened before and after Boykins' conviction. The year of Laufer's murder, Newark had its most homicides ever, 161, a record that still stands today. An Essex County homicide investigator charged Boykins in a prior slaying that year, but Boykins denied involvement, saying he was at work when the murder occurred. Bowers went to the detective — the same one who'd later arrest Boykins in Laufer's death — and told him so. 'He told me, 'I'm going to prove that he's guilty.' And I said, 'Well, I'm going to prove he's not!'' she said. 'I wanted to fight him, really, because he made me so mad, because you could tell it was personal with him with my son.' A judge dismissed the charges against Boykins, and several other men ultimately were convicted. There's a system failure. And it can't be the only time this has happened. – Attorney John Crayton Laufer's last day came on May 22, 1981. Two robbers entered his carpet company office and one shot him in the stomach. He died hours later. On June 28, 1981 — with no one yet arrested in Laufer's killing — police picked Boykins up for an unrelated aggravated assault. He had a .22-caliber revolver on him, but investigators determined it wasn't the murder weapon, Crayton said. Four days later, police charged him with Laufer's murder. Their evidence was scant, with a missing murder weapon, a fuzzy description of the robbers, and no forensic clues, Crayton found. Investigators also had a lead pointing them in another direction. An anonymous tipster identified another teenager with a violent history — who fit the description of the robbers — as one of those involved, and a polygraph indicated he lied when denying any knowledge of the robbery or murder, according to testimony from a 1989 post-conviction relief hearing for Boykins. But Milton Laufer's brother Harry had identified Boykins out of a lineup as one of the robbers, and the prosecution proceeded. Boykins' attorney was not told about the other teen who failed the polygraph. Prosecutors bolstered their case with the jailhouse informant, Alvis Holt, who told jurors Boykins confessed to him that he'd killed Laufer. After a four-day trial, jurors convicted Boykins. He was sentenced to life in prison and has repeatedly been denied parole since he became eligible for release in 2006. Boykins has raised multiple issues to allege he was wrongfully convicted. He has claimed that detectives, while he was in custody for the unrelated assault, directed him to stand in front of a mirror a day before the photo lineup. Crayton suspects that unusual direction served to give Harry Laufer an improper early peek at Boykins so that he'd be sure to identify Boykins as the culprit during the lineup the next day. Harry Laufer died in 2005. As for Holt's testimony, jurors never learned he had been charged in the sexual assaults of his girlfriend's daughters, ages 2 and 3, as well as the Aug. 10, 1981, murder of John McCall, a former Marine gunned down during a robbery outside Beth Israel Hospital. Prosecutors did not inform Boykins' trial attorney of either Holt's criminal troubles or his cooperation in the McCall case. Disclosure obligations require prosecutors to disclose any information to defense attorneys that could taint the credibility of a witness — such as prosecutors' cooperation deals with informants — to ensure defendants get a fair trial by allowing jurors to judge a witness' credibility. After Holt testified in Boykins' trial, prosecutors dropped charges against Holt in the sexual assault case. Holt's murder and robbery charges also were dismissed. Bowers said she watched Holt's testimony with growing fury. 'I said: 'He's a liar! He's a liar!'' she said. 'They told me they'd put me out if I don't shut up. So I shut up after that because I didn't want to make it bad for my son.' At Boykins' 1989 post-conviction relief hearing, Holt explained how he came to be a crucial witness in the case against Boykins, who he said he had never met until they landed on the same jail tier. Authorities initially asked him to sign a statement implicating another man in McCall's murder. When an Essex County homicide investigator learned Holt was housed with Boykins, Holt was asked to sign a statement implicating Boykins in Laufer's murder, Holt testified during that 1989 hearing. According to a transcript of the hearing, Holt testified that the detective referred to Boykins as 'that bastard.' 'He said, 'I want that bastard. That bastard got away from me, but he won't get away from me again,'' Holt said then. Boykins did not prevail in that hearing. 'He had a good lawyer. She put all kinds of people on the stand and proved that Alvis Holt was a liar. Alvis Holt took the stand and said he was a liar. She showed all these Brady violations, one after another after another,' Crayton said. 'But the judge downplayed them in his opinion, and even more shocking was that two years later, the appellate court just rubber-stamped that opinion. So there's a system failure. And it can't be the only time this has happened.' He added: 'It takes courage to admit that kind of wrong, and I think that's lacking.' The Essex County Prosecutor's Office didn't respond to a request for comment. In the decades since Boykins was convicted, New Jersey has implemented a series of changes to make criminal investigations and prosecutions fairer for defendants. The state has added new restrictions on photo lineups, recognizing that eyewitness identifications often are wrong, especially when they're cross-racial. Mistaken witness identifications factored into 27% of nearly 3,700 exonerations across the country since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. State officials have also changed the rules on jailhouse informants, who can be unreliable because they generally lack firsthand knowledge of a crime and have an incentive to lie. The courts also strengthened prosecutors' disclosure obligations on jailhouse informants under rules adopted in 2022, said Peter McAleer, a Judiciary spokesman. At the courts' direction, the state Attorney General's Office created an inventory of jailhouse informants in every county to track how many times they offer information or testify in cases, McAleer added. Jailhouse informants were involved in 15% of exonerations in murder cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The Attorney General's Office also reminded prosecutors of their disclosure obligations in a directive issued in 2019, the same year it created a conviction review unit. Meanwhile, Murphy formed a clemency advisory board last year to recommend worthy candidates for clemency. But exoneration work can be challenging. 'Procedural rules and time bars are routinely invoked to defeat the post-trial claims of persons with compelling evidence of actual innocence,' the Risingers of Seton Hall wrote in their study. 'Strong evidence of actual innocence is brushed aside and given no worth by our courts. Post-conviction discovery is highly restricted.' Because many of the challenges in getting exonerated stem from court hurdles, they added, 'the work of reviewing cases for innocence and other fundamental injustice should not be simply offloaded by our judiciary onto a conviction review unit.' McAleer said New Jersey trial courts received 356 post-conviction relief petitions last year, and time-related restrictions keep courts from being besieged by such filings. 'The court system cannot reasonably function without time limits on cases, but relevant court rules allow for relaxing limitations that 'would result in an injustice,'' he said. Even so, New Jersey has a dismal record on exonerations. Six years since its inception, the attorney general's conviction review unit has just two victories despite accepting 618 eligible cases to review. (Cases that remain on direct appeal or weren't felonies in state court are ineligible.) And Murphy, now in his eighth year in office, didn't exercise his clemency powers until December when he pardoned 33 people and commuted the sentences of three more. More than 3,000 people have applied for clemency consideration, said Tyler Jones, a Murphy spokeswoman. His office is expected to announce more clemency actions this week. Several groups outside government do exoneration work too, including the Risinger project, Princeton-based Centurion Ministries, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Innocence Project at Rutgers University. Still, New Jersey averaged just 1.6 exonerations a year between 2014 and 2023, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Illinois, the national leader, had an annual average of 34.6 over the same decade. Illinois, with 12 million residents, is larger than New Jersey, but Michigan, which is more comparable in size to the Garden State, averaged 9.7 exonerations a year, according to the registry. The work is time-consuming because it requires a full reinvestigation of a case, using both new technology and traditional investigative methods, said Attorney General's Office spokesman Dan Prochilo. The unit's standard for exoneration is clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence, he added. 'These investigations take substantial resources and time, as cases and evidence are often decades old,' he said. Estimates of how many people in prison were wrongfully convicted range from 1 to 10%. Using those metrics, at least 130 people of the nearly 13,000 people now in state prisons may have been wrongfully convicted. Boykins, now 63, has been behind bars for 44 years. Crayton has worked as a prosecutor, defense attorney, and investigator, and he knows politics plays a part in who succeeds in their exoneration bids. Boykins is not the kind of would-be exoneree who politicians will trot out for photo ops and press conferences. He's in poor physical and mental health, with diagnoses of schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder, and last year suffered a brutal beatdown at the hands of his cellmate, Crayton said. If the effort to exonerate Boykins succeeds, he'll likely need to remain in a psychiatric care home or similar setting, he added. 'There's no happy ending for Darren Boykins, none, period,' he said. 'The happy ending for him, maybe, is that he gets to see his mother once in a while, wherever he is, and he's safer there than staying in prison.' He still deserves a shot at freedom, he added. 'I don't think anybody should ignore what happened to Darren,' he said. 'Healthy societies need to acknowledge their wrongs.' Boykins' mother and brother still visit him in Trenton, where he's incarcerated at the New Jersey State Prison, as often as they can. 'He's real quiet, like this, like he's sleeping,' Bowers said, slouching and slitting her eyes. 'He told me they give him medicine. You could look at him and tell they keep him drugged.' Bowers, a retired special education teacher, mourns all that her son lost out on in life. 'If I was in there for something I didn't do, I don't think I could have made it this long. I probably would have been dead,' she said. 'I think God is just keeping him alive so he can have a chance, a little bit of a chance, at life. I pray to Allah every night to let my son come home before I die.' SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
