It’s never good to recommend a comedy by saying it makes you weep, but somehow Bluey, a comedy for kids, feels more real and more truthful than anything else on TV. I see so much of myself in Bandit’s triumphs and failures as he tries to parent his two daughters. I nod along to all of his unsuccessful parenting tactics that, I’ll admit, I’ve also tried on my own two kids. And then, at the end of so many episodes, I’ll realize that the front of my t-shirt is wet with tears because I've been crying.

There can’t be many people unfamiliar with Bluey, the biggest kids’ TV series on the planet, if not the biggest series overall. Each seven-minute episode is a slice-of-life sitcom about the Heelers, a family of anthropomorphic dogs living in Brisbane, Australia. Bluey and her younger sister Bingo live with parents Bandit and Chilli. The show started out focused on the playtimes the kids would have with each other or their parents. But it quickly sprawled out to create a rich world in the vein of The Simpsons, with a whole city’s worth of storylines. It can now regularly relegate the Heelers to the background to focus on the show’s deep cast of characters.

It closed out its third season with last Sunday's “The Sign,” a (comparatively) epic 28-minute episode and this week with “Surprise,” a sweet little postscript. The former’s long running time was described as a dry-run for any potential Bluey movie, wrapping up a number of the show’s storylines. It focuses on a wedding taking place at the Heeler’s home in the shadow of the family’s plan to relocate to another city. I won’t spoil too much beyond saying “The Sign” is a story about the bigness of change and how that affects parents and kids alike. Much of it focused on Bandit’s decision to move for a better-paid job and the way that impacted Chilli and the two girls. It’s a complicated issue, especially because it highlights that parents often just want to do what’s best for the kids.

Ludo Studio

“Surprise,” meanwhile, focuses more on the mundane struggle of Bandit trying to play two different games with his daughters at the same time. Much as Bluey wants to be just seven minutes of silly fun, it can’t quite help but be honest about the emotional and physical labor of parenting. All Bandit wants to do is sit down and watch sport on the TV but his daughters won’t allow him that luxury. He’s chased around the house, forced to pretend to teach a tennis ball to ride a bike and then pelted with ping pong balls fired from a toy launcher. (Bluey’s happy to highlight how often Bandit will get hit in the groin as a consequence of whatever game the girls are playing.)

The payoff to all of that effort comes in the final half minute of the episode, which is when I started sobbing. As much as it may be pitched as a palate cleanser after the scale and emotional heft of the previous episode, the final moments offer a real (if pleasant) punch to the gut. I can’t help but feel plenty of parallels in Bluey’s life and that of my own (similarly-aged) daughter, and feel a lot of kinship with Bandit as well. If I’m one one-hundredth as good a parent as this silly cartoon dog who often gets it wrong, then I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

There’s been speculation that this third season may be the end for Bluey. Bloomberg reported the uncertainty around creator Joe Brumm’s future with the show, although producer Sam Moor has said it will continue in some form. Any delay would also risk that the child actors – who remain anonymous for their own safety — will age out of being able to play their roles. But in many ways, Bluey can’t not continue given the show is now a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the BBC, which owns a big chunk of the show’s rights.

I don’t want to say goodbye to Bluey and the Heelers, and I’d prefer they kept the cast as-is and let them grow up alongside Bandit and Chilli. That, to me, would be an honest thing to do, rather than indulging in the fakery that dogs so many TV shows which face this problem. But if they have to go, I’ll choose to remember Bluey’s three perfect seasons through the highs and lows of parenting.

Tinder has revealed a feature that both helps users share their excitement about a date with loved ones and acts as a safety tool. The Share My Date feature lets users share details about a planned date with a single link.

The URL can point to details including the location, date and time of the rendezvous along with a photo of your match and a link to their profile. The page can include some notes too. You can edit your date plans so those you share that link with have the most up-to-date info. Dates can be set in the app up to 30 days in advance. For those lucky folks out there who have a bunch of matches they make IRL plans with, you can create an unlimited number of dates and share those with your loved ones.

Tinder says that around 51 percent of users under 30 already share date details with their friends, while 19 percent of users do so with their mom. It's always a good idea to let someone know where and when you're going on a date and details about the person you're meeting up with, just to be safe. Share My Date could simplify the process a bit. Back in 2020, Match.com debuted a date check-in feature that let users send details about their date to emergency contacts if things weren't going well.

Tinder will roll out Share My Date over the coming months. It'll be available in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore, India, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, Mexico, Netherlands, Italy, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand.

California will float a pair of bills designed to protect children from social media addiction and preserve their private data. The Protecting Youth from Social Media Addiction Act (SB 976) and California Children’s Data Privacy Act (AB 1949) were introduced Monday by the state’s Attorney General Rob Bonta, State Senator Nancy Skinner and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks. The proposed legislation follows a CA child safety bill that was set to go into effect this year but is now on hold.

SB 976 could give parents the power to remove addictive algorithmic feeds from their children’s social channels. If passed, it would allow parents of children under 18 to choose between the default algorithmic feed — typically designed to create profitable addictions — and a less habit-forming chronological one. It would also let parents block all social media notifications and prevent their kids from accessing social platforms during nighttime and school hours.

 “Social media companies have designed their platforms to addict users, especially our kids. Countless studies show that once a young person has a social media addiction, they experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem,” California Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) wrote in a press release. “We’ve waited long enough for social media companies to act. SB 976 is needed now to establish sensible guardrails so parents can protect their kids from these preventable harms.”

The Office of Nancy Skinner

Meanwhile, AB 1949 would attempt to strengthen data privacy for CA children under 18. The bill’s language gives the state’s consumers the right to know what personal information social companies collect and sell and allows them to prevent the sale of their children’s data to third parties. Any exceptions would require “informed consent,” which must be from a parent for children under 13.

In addition, AB 1949 would close loopholes in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that fail to protect the data of 17-year-olds effectively. The CCPA reserves its most robust protections for those under 16.

“This bill is a crucial step in our work to close the gaps in our privacy laws that have allowed tech giants to exploit and monetize our kids’ sensitive data with impunity,” wrote Wicks (D-Oakland).

The bills may be timed to coincide with a US Senate hearing (with five Big Tech CEOs in tow) on Wednesday covering children’s online safety. In addition, California is part of a 41-state coalition that sued Meta in October for harming children’s mental health. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that internal Meta (Facebook at the time) documents described “tweens” as “a valuable but untapped audience.”

A woman has a text chat with her long-dead lover. A family gets to hear a deceased elder speak again. A mother gets another chance to say goodbye to her child, who died suddenly, via a digital facsimile. This isn't a preview of the next season of Black Mirror — these are all true stories from the Sundance documentary Eternal You, a fascinating and frightening dive into tech companies using AI to digitally resurrect the dead.

It's yet another way modern AI, which includes large language models like ChatGPT and similar bespoke solutions, has the potential to transform society. And as Eternal You shows, the AI afterlife industry is already having a profound effect on its early users.

The film opens on a woman having a late night text chat with a friend: "I can't believe I'm trying this, how are you?" she asks, as if she's using the internet for the first time. "I'm okay. I'm working, I'm living. I'm... scared," her friend replies. When she asks why, they reply, "I'm not used to being dead."

Beetz Brothers Film Production

It turns out the woman, Christi Angel, is using the AI service Project December to chat with a simulation of her first love, who died many years ago. Angel is clearly intrigued by the technology, but as a devout Christian, she's also a bit spooked out by the prospect of raising the dead. The AI system eventually gives her some reasons to be concerned: Cameroun reveals that he's not in heaven, as she assumes. He's in hell.

"You're not in hell," she writes back. "I am in hell," the AI chatbot insists. The digital Cameroun says he's in a "dark and lonely" place, his only companions are "mostly addicts." The chatbot goes on to say he's currently haunting a treatment center and later suggests "I'll haunt you." That was enough to scare Angel and question why she was using this service in the first place.

While Angel was aware she was talking to a digital recreation of Cameroun, which was based on the information she provided to Project December, she interacted with the chatbot as if she was actually chatting with him on another plane of existence. That's a situation that many users of AI resurrection services will likely encounter: Rationality can easily overwhelm your emotional response while "speaking" with a dead loved one, even if the conversation is just occurring over text.

In the film, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle suggests that our current understanding of how AI affects people is similar to our relationship with social media over a decade ago. That makes it a good time to ask questions about the human values and purposes it's serving, she says. If we had a clearer understanding of social media early on, maybe we could have pushed Facebook and Twitter to confront misinformation and online abuse more seriously. (Perhaps the 2016 election would have looked very different if we were aware of how other countries could weaponize social media.)

Beetz Brothers Film Production

Eternal You also introduces us to Joshua Barbeau, a freelance writer who became a bit of an online celebrity in 2021 when The San Francisco Chronicle reported on his Project December chatbot: a digital version of his ex-fiancee Jessica. At first, he used Project December to chat with pre-built bots, but he eventually realized he could use the underlying technology (GPT-3, at the time) to create one with Jessica's personality. Their conversations look natural and clearly comfort Barbeau. But we're still left wondering if chatting with a facsimile of his dead fiancee is actually helping Barbeau to process his grief. It could just as easily be seen as a crutch that he feels compelled to pay for.

It's also easy to be cynical about these tools, given what we see from their creators in the film. We meet Jason Rohrer, the founder and Project December and a former indie game designer, who comes across as a typical techno-libertarian.

"I believe in personal responsibility," he says, after also saying that he's not exactly in control of the AI models behind Project December, and right before we see him nearly crash a drone into his co-founders face. "I believe that consenting adults can use that technology however they want and they're responsible for the results of whatever they're doing. It's not my job as the creator of the technology to prevent the technology from being released, because I'm afraid of what somebody might do with it."

But, as MIT's Turkle points out, reanimating the dead via AI introduces moral questions that engineers like Rohrer likely aren't considering. "You're dealing with something much more profound in the human spirit," she says. "Once something is constituted enough that you can project onto it, this life force. It's our desire to animate the world, which is human, which is part of our beauty. But we have to worry about it, we have to keep it in check. Because I think it's leading us down a dangerous path."

Beetz Brothers Film Production

Another service, Hereafter.ai, lets users record stories to create a digital avatar of themselves, which family members can talk to now or after they die. One woman was eager to hear her father's voice again, but when she presented the avatar to her family the reaction was mixed. Younger folks seemed intrigue, but the older generation didn't want any part of it. "I fear that sometimes we can go too far with technology," her father's sister said. "I would just love to remember him as a person who was wonderful. I don't want my brother to appear to me. I'm satisfied knowing he's at peace, he's happy, and he's enjoying the other brothers, his mother and father."

YOV, an AI company that also focuses on personal avatars, or "Versonas," wants people to have seamless communication with their dead relatives across multiple channels. But, like all of these other digital afterlife companies, it runs into the same moral dilemmas. Is it ethical to digitally resurrect someone, especially if they didn't agree to it? Is the illusion of speaking to the dead more helpful or harmful for those left behind?

The most troubling sequence in Eternal You focuses on a South Korean mother, Jang Ji-sun, who lost her young child and remains wracked with guilt about not being able to say goodbye. She ended up being the central subject in a VR documentary, Meeting You, which was broadcast in South Korea in early 2020. She went far beyond a mere text chat: Jang donned a VR headset and confronted a startlingly realistic model of her child in virtual reality. The encounter was clearly moving for Jang, and the documentary received plenty of media attention at the time.

"There's a line between the world of the living and the world of the dead," said Kim Jong-woo, the producer behind Meeting You. "By line, I mean the fact that the dead can't come back to life. But people saw the experience as crossing that line. After all, I created an experience in which the beloved seemed to have returned. Have I made some huge mistake? Have I broken the principle of humankind? I don't know... maybe to some extent."

Eternal You paints a haunting portrait of an industry that's already revving up to capitalize on grief-stricken people. That's not exactly new; psychics and people claiming to speak to the dead have been around for our entire civilization. But through AI, we now have the ability to reanimate those lost souls. While that might be helpful for some, we're clearly not ready for a world where AI resurrection is commonplace.

Instagram has revealed its latest mindfulness feature targeted at teens. When a younger user scrolls for more than 10 minutes in the likes of Reels or their direct messages, the app will suggest that they close the app and get to bed.

These "Nighttime Nudges" will automatically appear on teens' accounts and it won't be possible to switch them off. Instagram didn't specify whether the feature will be enabled for all teenagers or only under-18s. 

The idea, according to Instagram, is to give teens who aren't already using features such as Take a Break reminders to close the app for the night. "We want teens to leave Instagram feeling like the time they spend on the app is meaningful and intentional, and we know sleep is particularly important for young people," Instagram said.

The new tool follows other features Instagram has rolled out to help teens and their parents manage time spent on the app. Along with Take a Break and parental supervision features, this includes the likes of Quiet Mode. The latter enables teens to mute notifications, automatically reply to messages and let their friends and followers know that they're unavailable and doing something else, such as studying or sleeping.

Discord has updated its policy meant to protect children and teens on its platform after reports came out that predators have been using the app to create and spread child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), as well as to groom young teens. The platform now explicitly prohibits AI-generated photorealistic CSAM. As The Washington Post recently reported, the rise in generative AI has also led to the explosion of lifelike images with sexual depictions of children. The publication had seen conversations about the use of Midjourney — a text-to-image generative AI on Discord — to create inappropriate images of children.

In addition to banning AI-generated CSAM, Discord now also explicitly prohibits any other kind of text or media content that sexualizes children. The platform has banned teen dating servers, as well, and has vowed to take action against users engaging in this behavior. A previous NBC News investigation found Discord servers advertised as teen dating servers with participants that solicited nude images from minors. 

Adult users had previously been prosecuted for grooming children on Discord, and there are even crime rings extorting underage users to send sexual images of themselves. Banning teen dating servers completely could help mitigate the issue. Discord has also included a line in its policy, which states that older teens found to be grooming younger teens will be "reviewed and actioned under [its] Inappropriate Sexual Conduct with Children and Grooming Policy."

Aside from updating its rules, Discord recently launched a Family Center tool that parents can use to keep an eye on their kids' activity on the chat service. While parents won't be able to see the actual contents of their kids' message, the opt-in tool allows them to see who their children are friends with and who they talk to on the platform. Discord is hoping that these new measures and tools can help keep its underage users safe along with its old measures, which include proactively scanning images uploaded to its platform using PhotoDNA. 

Discord is announcing Family Center, a new tool that will help keep parents and guardians in the loop on what their teens are doing on the platform. The company says the main goal of the tool is to help both teens and parents build better internet habits.

The new Family Center utility comes in two parts: an activity dashboard and a weekly email summary. The dashboard will give parents an insight into how many people their kids have messaged or called, along with data on how many friends they’ve added and how many servers they’re connected to at any time. The weekly summary is all of that, but in an email sent every week.

Family Center will join all of the existing parental control tools already found on Discord, giving both teens and guardians more options to customize their experience on the platform. Tools such as direct message and explicit image filtering, friend request settings and user blocking have helped teens stay safe on Discord.

While Discord’s new Family Center tool is a step in the right direction, the company has a lot of work to do to make its platform a safe space not only for teenagers but adults as well. Last month, it was reported that Discord was in hot water over an astonishing amount of cases regarding child safety on the platform. Hopefully, Family Center can help reduce these incidents on Discord.

Meta has added new tools to its Family Center that will allow parents to see and control how their teenage kids are using Messenger. They'll now be able to view how much time their kid spends on the app, along with their privacy and safety settings. Parents and guardians will be able to see who can message their child and who can see their stories. In addition, they can get notifications for changes to their teen's contact list and for any changes their kid makes to their privacy and safety settings. If their child reports a user to Meta, parents can also get notified if their teen chooses to share the information with them. 

The social networking giant said these are but the first batch of parental supervision tools coming to Family Center, and that it plans to add more over the next year. While they're only rolling out for users in the US, UK and Canada at the moment, Meta intends to expand their availability to other regions around the world in the coming months. Take note that Facebook has had parental controls for Messenger Kids for years, and these tools are for the main Messenger app, meant for parents with teens 13 to 18 years old. 

Facebook/Meta

Aside from these new parental tools, Meta will now show teens a notification when they've already spent 20 minutes on Facebook to urge them to set daily time limits. For Instagram, it's exploring a new nudge feature that will ask teens to close the app if they've been scrolling Reels at night. Meta has also expanded its parental controls for Instagram to show parents how many friends their teen has in common with accounts they follow and are followed by. Plus, teens will get a new notification after they've blocked someone, encouraging them to add their parents to supervise their account. 

Instagram/Meta

The company has a few safety updates that aren't teen-focused, as well. It's rolling out Quiet Mode, which mutes all notifications and changes a user's profile status, on Instagram around the world over the coming weeks. It's also currently testing a couple of new features meant to protect Instagram users from unwanted DMs. Users must now send an invite to connect to someone who doesn't follow them before being able to send a message. Further, they can only send one invite at a time and can't send more until the recipient accepts it. These message request invites are text only, prohibiting users from being able to send photos, videos or voice messages to other users they're not connected to. 

Instagram

Good news for parents with teens: Venmo is rolling out what it calls Venmo Teen Accounts. This lets parents create accounts for minors aged 13 to 17. It comes with a Venmo Teen Debit Card, which gives parents or guardians an insight into spending, lets them send money and allows them to manage privacy settings.

According to Venmo, over 50 percent of parents are interested in using apps to help their children learn about money. The company also claims that over 45 percent of Gen Z want to have a conversation with an adult about managing personal finances. The Venmo Teen Account should hopefully bridge that gap for many parents or guardians out there.

Venmo says that the Venmo Teen Account has no monthly fees and that the debit card will have no-fee cash withdrawals at ATMs. Of course, the account will be able to send and receive money from family and friends. Parents and guardians will be able to see friends list, transaction history, account balance, and be able to manage the debit card’s PIN, lock and unlock it and block users from interacting with the account.

And since it’s separate from the parent or guardian’s account, teens will be able to independently track their own spending and learn financial responsibility. Venmo says that teen accounts will be eligible for direct deposit, which is great for those with part-time jobs.

Signing up for a teen account is pretty straightforward. Parents or guardians will need to sign into their personal Venmo account and tap Me > (Your Name) > Create a teen account. From there, you’ll need to add a name, address, and date of birth, and choose a debit card style from a selection of a few colors.

Venmo Teen Accounts will be rolling out to select users in June of 2023 and will be available on a wider scale in the weeks following.

The age of walking around a home goods store with your fiancé scanning items to upload to your registry has long come and gone. Digital wedding registries have sprung up in its place, with most large companies offering one. Now, Etsy has launched a site-wide wedding registry, joining the ranks of stores like Amazon, Macy's and Pottery Barn. It's a logical step for Etsy, home to seemingly endless products and a section devoted just to "Wedding & Party" filled with gifts and decorations.

Wedding registries are available to anyone with an Etsy account and are free to create. When you click the "Create a wedding registry" button, a pop-up asks if you've set a wedding date yet. From there, it opens a personal homepage where you can favorite or add gifts to your registry. It also suggests gifts below and tracks how many items have been added and purchased. You can view your registry or add more options at any time through the registry homepage or on your account dropdown menu.

Gift listings can get very specific, with options to include detailed personalization requests. Customization is a feature the makers-centric e-commerce company is known for and one that might set them apart from some of the other wedding registry sites. The company certainly hopes so: It attributes the introduction of its wedding registries to a growing desire for personalized gifts over more standard, mass-produced options. According to Etsy, users' searches for handmade gifts increased by 872 percent in the last three months compared to the same time last year. 

Guests looking to shop your registry will need to make an Etsy account to buy anything. On the registry homepage, they can click "Find a registry" and search your name to browse items. Once purchased, sellers will receive orders as usual with a note that it's from a registry.