Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on youth safety, released an assessment saying OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teens poses an "unacceptable risk." The feature, introduced in August, is designed to help students learn, but the assessment claims its guardrails fall short of what OpenAI promised.
The review found that ChatGPT for Teens does not send alerts to parents when it should, does not offer the right help in crisis situations, and still does kids' homework. Tom Siegel, executive director of Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute, said a teen could spend an hour talking about self-harm without a parent receiving a single alert.
OpenAI pushed back, saying the bulk of Common Sense Media's testing may have begun and concluded before parental controls were fully activated, making the findings inaccurate. Common Sense Media responded that it confirmed with OpenAI before testing that features were fully launched, and that some test accounts linked for significantly longer still produced no notifications. Both sides say they are committed to teen safety, but they differ sharply on whether the current safeguards work.