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.
JITTERS: Nexperia has a 20 percent market share for chips powering simpler features such as window controls, and changing supply chains could take years European carmakers are looking into ways to scratch components made with parts from China, spooked by deepening geopolitical spats playing out through chipmaker Nexperia BV and Beijing’s export controls on rare earths. To protect operations from trade ructions, several automakers are pushing major suppliers to find permanent alternatives to Chinese semiconductors, people familiar with the matter said. The industry is considering broader changes to its supply chain to adapt to shifting geopolitics, Europe’s main suppliers lobby CLEPA head Matthias Zink said. “We had some indications already — questions like: ‘How can you supply me without this dependency on China?’” Zink, who also
At least US$50 million for the freedom of an Emirati sheikh: That is the king’s ransom paid two weeks ago to militants linked to al-Qaeda who are pushing to topple the Malian government and impose Islamic law. Alongside a crippling fuel blockade, the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) has made kidnapping wealthy foreigners for a ransom a pillar of its strategy of “economic jihad.” Its goal: Oust the junta, which has struggled to contain Mali’s decade-long insurgency since taking power following back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021, by scaring away investors and paralyzing the west African country’s economy.
BUST FEARS: While a KMT legislator asked if an AI bubble could affect Taiwan, the DGBAS minister said the sector appears on track to continue growing The local property market has cooled down moderately following a series of credit control measures designed to contain speculation, the central bank said yesterday, while remaining tight-lipped about potential rule relaxations. Lawmakers in a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee voiced concerns to central bank officials that the credit control measures have adversely affected the government’s tax income and small and medium-sized property developers, with limited positive effects. Housing prices have been climbing since 2016, even when the central bank imposed its first set of control measures in 2020, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) said. “Since the second half of
AI BOOST: Next year, the cloud and networking product business is expected to remain a key revenue pillar for the company, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu said Manufacturing giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday posted its best third-quarter profit in the company’s history, backed by strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers. Net profit expanded 17 percent annually to NT$57.67 billion (US$1.86 billion) from NT$44.36 billion, the company said. On a quarterly basis, net profit soared 30 percent from NT$44.36 billion, it said. Hon Hai, which is Apple Inc’s primary iPhone assembler and makes servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, said earnings per share expanded to NT$4.15 from NT$3.55 a year earlier and NT$3.19 in the second quarter. Gross margin improved to 6.35 percent,
RSS