ChatGPT to get parental controls after teen’s death

OpenAI plans further safety improvements, including enhanced models for recognising mental distress. Photo / Getty Images

American artificial intelligence firm OpenAI said Tuesday it would add parental controls to its chatbot ChatGPT, a week after an American couple said 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 behaviour rules”, the generative AI company said in a blog post.

Parents will also receive notifications from ChatGPT “when the system detects their teen is in a moment of acute distress”, OpenAI added.

The company had trialed a system of parental controls in a late August blog post.

That came one day after a court filing from California parents Matthew and Maria Raine, alleging that ChatGPT provided their 16-year-old son with detailed suicide instructions and encouraged him to put his plans into action.

The Raines’ case was just the latest in a string that have surfaced in recent months of people being encouraged in delusional or harmful trains of thought by AI chatbots – prompting OpenAI to say it would reduce models’ “sycophancy” towards users.

“We continue to improve how our models recognise and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress,” OpenAI said Tuesday.

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.

-Agence France-Presse