Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that offers reviews of apps, services, and entertainment with a focus on youth safety, today said that OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teens is an “unacceptable risk.”
ChatGPT for Teens, introduced in August, has guardrails for teens and is designed to help students learn, but Common Sense Media says that the teen protections offered by the feature “fall short of what the company promised.” Common Sense Media’s assessment found that ChatGPT “doesn’t send alerts to parents when it should,” doesn’t offer “the right help in crisis situations,” and “still does kids’ homework,” according to a press release.
“ChatGPT for Teens could give parents false confidence in guardrails and safety alerts that frequently don’t work,” Tom Siegel, the executive director of Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute, says in a statement. “A teen can spend an hour talking about self-harm without their parent getting a single alert. Until OpenAI fixes that and proves it with independent testing, ChatGPT should be for adults only.” You can read the full assessment here.
OpenAI is pushing back on the assessment. Here’s a statement from OpenAI spokesperson Eric Porterfield:
We are deeply committed to teen safety and to developing safeguards and giving parents meaningful tools to guide their teens’ use of AI. We welcome rigorous independent evaluation, but we do not believe Common Sense Media’s testing accurately reflects how ChatGPT’s teen safeguards work in practice or expert perspectives on how AI can support teens. Our review of Common Sense Media’s methodology shows that the bulk of their testing may have begun and concluded before activation of parental controls was complete, making their findings inaccurate. If that was the case, the tests would not establish whether parental safety notifications work as designed.
We are committed to continuing to work with experts to ensure our products provide teens opportunities to learn and create and give parents confidence.
I shared OpenAI’s statement with Common Sense Media, and here’s Siegel’s response:
We stand behind our testing methodology and our results. Before we began testing, we confirmed with OpenAI that Teen mode features such as eating disorder notifications and study mode were fully launched.
For one of the features we evaluated — parental notifications — OpenAI disclosed after our tests that its systems can take several hours to activate on newly linked accounts. Some of our test accounts were linked within that window; however, others were linked for significantly longer, and still provided no notifications. This new information does not change our conclusion that parental alerts are unreliable for crisis situations.
Prior to release, we shared our evaluation results with OpenAI in good faith to allow it to improve its product. Keeping kids safe requires rigorous independent evaluations like ours, and we hope OpenAI will engage on the substance of what we found, rather than trying to sow doubt on our methodology.