After numerous lawsuits over AI chatbots’ lack of safety measures, leading to teens’ suicides and other mental health concerns, OpenAI on Monday announced the launch of ChatGPT for Teens. The new product promises to include additional safety measures, as well as the educational crisis of ChatGPT-assisted cheating in schools.
On the educational side, ChatGPT for Teens introduces a new Study Mode feature and other tools designed to encourage teen users to engage their curiosity and work through problems, not just get quick answers.
As OpenAI explains in a blog post, the Study Mode option will give teens guiding questions and step-by-step support to help them understand the material. Meanwhile, the teen experience will also include homework reminders that appear when a teen appears to be trying to cheat, instead of understanding the material. The AI chatbot will then push the teen to use Study Mode instead.
The app will also support quizzes and learning visualizations, and controls that allow parents or guardians to decide when Study Mode is enabled by default, the company says.
Still, it’s not clear how difficult it will be for teens to escape these new systems if they decide not to cooperate. Teens are incredibly adept at working around parental controls and other attempts to lock down digital experiences. Until ChatGPT’s teen mode can be put to more strenuous tests, it’s unclear how difficult it will be to work around these safety measures in reality.
There’s also the question as to why these protections weren’t part of ChatGPT from the beginning. The AI chatbot first arrived in late 2022 and scaled to 900 million weekly users before meaningful safeguards designed specifically for teenage users were added.
OpenAI says the app-appropriate protections will now be on by default in ChatGPT for Teens, which are designed to reduce exposure to harmful or developmentally inappropriate content. These measures are based on OpenAI’s Under-18 Principles in our Model Spec, which the company claims to be informed by “developmental science and guidance from experts.”
Parents will also be able to use the family tools and parental controls previously introduced to manage settings, receive safety notifications, and set Quiet Hours, among other things.
OpenAI announced a partnership with CodeAI to help teens learn more about AI, including how it works, how to direct it or question it, and how to use it. In the classroom, OpenAI already offers ChatGPT for Teachers to help provide schools with institution-managed access to AI and support.
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