ChatGPT wants teens to agree to let their parents spy on them
Good luck with that!
OpenAI says it is introducing parental controls to ChatGPT that will help improve the safety of teenagers using its AI chatbot. The only catch? Teens will have to allow their parents to connect to their accounts before the controls can take effect.
The new protections are designed to help ChatGPT identify when a teenager chatting with it might be thinking about harming themselves or otherwise be in distress. OpenAI is adding the features after facing criticism and a high-profile lawsuit alleging its chatbot contributed to a teenager's death.
“If there are signs of acute distress, we will contact parents by email, text message and push alert on their phone,” the company said in a blog post introducing the controls.
OpenAI hasn’t gone into details about "the system" it’s using to detect identifiers of potential harm in inputs made by teenage users – but the company promises that flagged interactions with ChatGPT will be reviewed by what it describes as “a small team of specially trained people” who will decide if an alert is sent to parents.
“I’m especially proud of this launch because it combines two things we care deeply about: helping teens learn, explore, and create with ChatGPT - and giving families tools to guide that experience,” Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, posted on LinkedIn. (That is, if ChatGPT didn’t write it for him …)
The parental controls can also be used to reduce the chances of kids seeing sensitive or graphic content.
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Worried parents can choose to “customize” - as OpenAI describes it - their teen’s chatbot usage by setting specific times of day ChatGPT can’t be used, turning off ChatGPT’s voice mode or turning off the LLM’s memory, so it won’t draw upon previous interactions when responding.
Parents can also remove image generation, preventing kids from using ChatGPT to create pictures. Additionally, OpenAI is introducing the ability to opt teen accounts out of model training, so their conversations aren’t used to train ChatGPT.
Privacy campaigners are likely to raise concerns that ChatGPT’s parental controls enable parents to snoop on their children – but in their statement on the new safety options, OpenAI says “We take teen privacy seriously” and “we will only share the information needed for parents or emergency responders to protect a teen’s safety.”
The parental controls require the teen to agree to allowing them to be applied, which might not be a simple ask. However, OpenAI notes that the company is building an age prediction system designed to identify whether a user is under 18 “so that ChatGPT can automatically apply teen-appropriate settings.”
Unfortunately, this blanket approach to age detection could also catch adults who happen to write like teens. “In instances where we’re unsure of a user’s age, we’ll take the safer route and apply teen settings proactively,” the OpenAI blog post said. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
