OpenAI is launching parental controls for ChatGPT, which it announced following a lawsuit alleging a teenager who died by suicide earlier this year relied on the popular chatbot as a coach.
The tools, pushed out to all users yesterday, let parents limit the ways teenagers use the chatbot and receive alerts if ChatGPT determines a teenager might be in distress. The controls, which are accessible through ChatGPT’s settings, also enable parents to set the hours when their child cannot use the service — the chatbot is meant for users who are 13 or older.
The update comes in the wake of mounting pressure for the artificial intelligence (AI) start-up to make changes to its chatbot, which has amassed more than 700 million users since its launch in late 2022.
Photo: AFP
After the family of Adam Raine sued OpenAI and chief executive officer Sam Altman last month over the California high-school student’s death, the company announced a slew of changes to ChatGPT, including parental controls.
The suit, which followed a string of other reports about heavy chatbot users engaging in harmful behavior, alleges that ChatGPT systematically isolated Raine from family and helped him plan his death. He died by hanging in April.
“We have felt urgency around this for a while,” OpenAI’s head of youth wellbeing Lauren Jonas said, adding that the company is working as quickly as it can to build tools such as the parental controls.
The alerts are meant to give parents enough knowledge about a potentially harmful situation to have a conversation with their teenager while still respecting the child’s privacy and autonomy, Jonas said.
OpenAI would not share a teenager’s ChatGPT conversations with their parents, she said.
In addition to the parental controls, San Francisco-based OpenAI has said it is working on software to predict a user’s age, which the company plans to use to guide how ChatGPT responds to those who are under 18.
Separately, Apple Inc has developed a ChatGPT-like iPhone app to help test and prepare for a long-anticipated overhaul of Siri coming next year, people familiar with the matter said.
The company’s AI division is using the app to quickly evaluate new features for Siri, Apple’s voice-powered assistant. That includes testing the ability to search through personal data, such as songs and e-mails, and perform in-app actions such as editing photos, said the people, who asked not to be identified, because the initiative is private.
The new Siri is now slated to debut as early as March after multiple delays. Apple had planned to release the Siri overhaul in the spring, but delayed the rollout after engineering problems caused the features to fail as much as one-third of the time.
A spokesperson for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.
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