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| Google's Youth-Focused AI Chatbot |
Google recently abandoned the development of an AI chatbot called "Bubble Characters" designed to interact with Gen Z users. The chatbot aimed to have "human-like" conversations and provide relationship advice. It used a cartoonish voice and engaged users by asking them questions about themselves. However, Google has not provided an official comment on the matter.
The document describing the app highlighted how the concept transformed from science fiction into the next level of human-level conversation. Gen Z, born from 1997 onwards and now up to 26 years old, was the target audience for this AI chatbot. Gen Z is known for being digital natives shaped by social media, climate concerns, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The motivation behind Google's youth-focused AI project remains unclear. It is uncertain whether concerns about child safety, given that many Gen Zers are minors, influenced the decision to discontinue the project. The discontinuation follows Senator Michael F. Bennet's open letter expressing concerns about AI's impact on children, which was sent to several tech executives, including Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai.
Senator Bennet expressed concerns about the risks associated with AI-powered chatbots, highlighting that children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable due to their cognitive and emotional development. They are more impressionable, impulsive, and less equipped to discern fact from fiction, making them susceptible to false information, bias, and manipulation.
In an internal restructuring of Google's Assistant team, Bubble Characters, the chatbot targeted at Gen Z, was deprioritized, indicating the potential end of the project. Google shifted its focus to Bard, its primary large language model (LLM) competing with ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing.
Google continues to work on specialized chatbots, including Med-PaLM 2, an AI designed for medical use. It offers diagnostic predictions, synthesizes patient data, and provides answers to medical inquiries.
Several former Google executives have left the company to pursue their own AI ventures in specialized domains. Notably, Mustafa Suleyman, the former head of Google's DeepMind lab and VP of AI policy, raised $1.3 billion for his startup, Inflection AI. The company offers a personal AI assistant that empathetically listens and engages in conversation, similar to Bubble Characters but without targeting a specific age group.
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