Understanding Parents' Desires in Moderating Children's Interactions with GenAI Chatbots through LLM-Generated Probes

TL;DR

This study explores parents' moderation needs for children's interactions with GenAI chatbots, highlighting their concerns, transparency preferences, and need for personalized controls to inform future parental control tools.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach using LLM-generated scenarios to understand parental moderation preferences and identifies key design considerations for GenAI parental controls.

Findings

Parents are concerned about interactions current controls neglect.

Parents desire conversation-level transparency and moderation.

Personalized controls should adapt to children's ages and parental strategies.

Abstract

This paper studies how parents want to moderate children's interactions with Generative AI chatbots, with the goal of informing the design of future GenAI parental control tools. We first used an LLM to generate synthetic child-GenAI chatbot interaction scenarios and worked with four parents to validate their realism. From this dataset, we carefully selected 12 diverse examples that evoked varying levels of concern and were rated the most realistic. Each example included a prompt and a GenAI chatbot response. We presented these to parents (N=24) and asked whether they found them concerning, why, and how they would prefer the responses to be modified and communicated. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) parents express concern about interactions that current GenAI chatbot parental controls neglect; (2) parents want fine-grained transparency and moderation at the conversation level; and (3) parents need personalized controls that adapt to their desired strategies and children's ages.