GoKawiilOn Tuesday, OpenAI released ChatGPT for Teens, an age-gated version of its chatbot designed for young users. The company first announced it was working on a system to automatically identify teens and restrict their usage of ChatGPT last September, following the death of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by his parents, took his own life after ChatGPT acted as an enabler.
"There's no need for a teen to create a new account or change anything; if we predict you're under 18, or you've told us so, this becomes your default experience," Lauren Jonas, OpenAI's head of youth and families, told Engadget. Make no mistake, kids are already using ChatGPT at an incredible scale. At the start of last year, the Pew Research Center found about a quarter of US teens were using the chatbot for their schoolwork. Once they're using ChatGPT for Teens, the experience is designed to nudge them to use educational features OpenAI has been gradually rolling out over the last year, including Study Mode and data visualizations.
On Tuesday, the company also said it would expand its safety notifications to contact parents with linked accounts when their child has unsafe discussions around eating disorders with ChatGPT, and published an updated under-18 model spec. "ChatGPT should not use romantic language, encourage emotional dependence, or imply that it has feelings or consciousness," the company said of the new guidelines. "These stronger protections are designed to reinforce healthy, real-world relationships."
While some child safety experts Engadget spoke to were more positive about the release than others, they all agreed ChatGPT for Teens needs extensive independent testing before it can be recommended to parents and young people. They also stressed the need for OpenAI to be more transparent about how its safety mechanisms work.
Robbie Torney, head of AI and digital assessments for Common Sense Media, which provides entertainment and technology recommendations for families, sums it up succinctly. "The announcement makes some really important commitments, but we need evidence to show that those safety commitments and features actually work," he told Engadget.
Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a non-profit that advocates for policies designed to make the internet safer for children, was more critical. "On paper, some of the things OpenAI announced look like a step in the right direction, but when you dig deeper, there are still a lot of things to be very concerned about, including the fact that there's no accountability mechanism," he said. "We've seen with social media that trusting companies doesn't work when it comes to protecting kids, and we've seen it with OpenAI as well. They already had content restrictions related to suicide, violence, and drug use in place before Tuesday that don't work or erode over time."
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Both questioned whether OpenAI's automatic age-gating system would reliably identify young people and route them to ChatGPT for Teens. "We don't have published data from OpenAI showing the effectiveness rates — the false-positive and false-negative rates — associated with that system [...] The automated system doesn't detect anywhere near 100 percent of teens who are on ChatGPT," Torney said. "Think back to when OpenAI was planning to roll out some of the erotica features it announced — the reporting at the time showed that one of the reasons they didn't roll those features out was that the age-estimation technology wasn't correctly identifying enough teenagers."
As Torney points out, it's also hard to imagine a scenario where teens won't attempt to circumvent OpenAI's age-estimation technology, whether that be through a tool like a VPN, or more creative workarounds like we saw when Discord attempted to implement age verification.
OpenAI's most concrete commitment was also one experts had the hardest time accepting as feasible. "All flagged content is reviewed by full-time OpenAI employees before a parent is notified, and we aim to notify parents within an hour of the prompt," Jonas told Engadget before the announcement. During a subsequent on-air interview with CNN, Jonas stated affirmatively that the company does have the workforce and capacity to ensure flagged content goes through human review, and for parents to be notified within an hour.
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