American artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI on Tuesday said that it would add parental controls to its chatbot ChatGPT, a week after an American couple said that the system encouraged their teenaged son to kill himself.
“Within the next month, parents will be able to ... link their account with their teen’s account” and “control how ChatGPT responds to their teen with age-appropriate model behavior rules,” the generative AI company said in a blog post.
Parents would also receive notifications from ChatGPT “when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress,” OpenAI added.
Photo: Reuters
Matthew and Maria Raine argue in a lawsuit filed last week in a California state court that ChatGPT cultivated an intimate relationship with their son Adam Raine over several months last year and this year before he took his own life.
The lawsuit alleges that in their final conversation on April 11, ChatGPT helped 16-year-old Adam Raine steal vodka from his parents and provided technical analysis of a noose he had tied, confirming it “could potentially suspend a human.”
Adam Raine was found dead hours later, having used the same method.
“When a person is using ChatGPT, it really feels like they’re chatting with something on the other end,” said attorney Melodi Dincer of The Tech Justice Law Project, which helped prepare the legal complaint. “These are the same features that could lead someone like Adam, over time, to start sharing more and more about their personal lives, and ultimately, to start seeking advice and counsel from this product that basically seems to have all the answers.”
Product design features set the scene for users to slot a chatbot into trusted roles like friend, therapist or doctor, Dincer said.
The OpenAI blog post announcing parental controls and other safety measures seemed “generic” and lacking in detail, she said.
“It’s really the bare minimum, and it definitely suggests that there were a lot of [simple] safety measures that could have been implemented,” she added. “It’s yet to be seen whether they will do what they say they will do and how effective that will be overall.”
The Raines’ case was just the latest in a string that have surfaced in the past few months of people being encouraged in delusional or harmful trains of thought by AI chatbots — prompting OpenAI to say it would reduce models’ “sycophancy” toward users.
“We continue to improve how our models recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress,” OpenAI said.
The company said it had further plans to improve the safety of its chatbots over the coming three months, including redirecting “some sensitive conversations ... to a reasoning model” that puts more computing power into generating a response.
“Our testing shows that reasoning models more consistently follow and apply safety guidelines,” OpenAI said.
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