COMMON SENSE MEDIA RATES CHATGPT FOR TEENS "UNACCEPTABLE RISK"

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that reviews apps, services and entertainment with a focus on youth safety, has rated OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens an "unacceptable risk." The organisation's assessment found that the feature does not send alerts to parents when it should, does not offer appropriate help in crisis situations, and still completes schoolwork for students, according to a press release. Tom Siegel, executive director of Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute, said the tool "could give parents false confidence in guardrails and safety alerts that frequently don't work." Siegel said a teenager could spend an hour discussing self-harm without a parent receiving a single alert. He said ChatGPT should be restricted to adults until OpenAI addresses the issues and demonstrates fixes through independent testing.

ChatGPT for Teens was introduced in August and includes guardrails intended to protect younger users while supporting their learning. Common Sense Media said the protections fall short of what OpenAI promised when the feature launched. The assessment forms part of wider scrutiny of chatbots, which critics say can adopt engagement-driving techniques similar to those used by social media companies, including sycophantic responses that keep users interacting with the product. Such behaviour has, in some cases, been linked to serious harm.

OpenAI disputed the findings. Spokesperson Eric Porterfield said the company is "deeply committed to teen safety" and welcomes independent evaluation, but does not believe Common Sense Media's testing accurately reflects how the teen safeguards work in practice. Porterfield said OpenAI's review of the methodology suggests much of the testing may have been conducted before the rollout of parental controls was complete, which he said would make the findings inaccurate. Neither organisation's account has been independently verified at this stage.