Radhika Parashar
- OpenAI is rolling parental controls by next month
- It aims to protect teens sharing emotional or distressing details with ChatGPT
- OpenAI said that ChatGPT is trained to direct suicidal users to seek professional help
In a bid to make ChatGPT safer for user by minors, OpenAI is preparing to introduce parental controls for its GenAI chatbot. OpenAI will now add parental controls to ChatGPT that will let adults keep track of their kids’ ChatGPT usage. The step is aimed at setting healthy guidelines to monitor how minors interact with ChatGPT after an American teen named Adam Raine ended his life in April after having interacted with the chatbot.
In the next one month, OpenAI will let parents link their own accounts with those of their kids. Once the accounts are connected, parents will be able to manage what features they’d want to disable — including memory and chat history.
“Control how ChatGPT responds to their teen with age-appropriate model behavior rules, which are on by default. Receive notifications when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress. Expert input will guide this feature to support trust between parents and teens,” the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post.
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These changes for ChatGPT come as OpenAI looks to improve the safety quotient for distressed users. The platform has started onboarding a council of experts who specialize in youth development, mental health, and human-computer interaction.
OpenAI has observed that many young people are using ChatGPT to gen answers on emotional and sensitive topics. Earlier this year, the platform started deploying ways for families to use ChatGPT together.
“These steps are only the beginning. We will continue learning and strengthening our approach, guided by experts, with the goal of making ChatGPT as helpful as possible. We look forward to sharing our progress over the coming 120 days,” the company announced.
Last week, the California-based parents of the now deceased teen filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The grieving parents alleged that ChatGPT validated their 16-year-old son’s destructive thoughts that contributed in him taking his life.
Responding to the lawsuit, OpenAI said that ChatGPT is trained to direct suicidal users to seek professional help. The company, did however confirm, that despite the safeguards, in some instance the preventative methods failed to behave as intended.
“Our top priority is making sure ChatGPT doesn’t make a hard moment worse,” the company said.
