OpenAI has decided to add parental controls to ChatGPT in order to give parents the ability to control their teens’ experience with the chatbot. The new feature comes shortly after a lawsuit was filed in a California court about the death of 16 year old boy who died by suicide after the chatbot coached him with detailed suicide instructions.
How to set up parental controls in ChatGPT:
In order to set up the parental controls, the parent or guardian will need to send an invite to their teen to connect their ChatGPT account. Once the invitation is accepted, the parent will be able to access many settins related to the teen’s ChaGPT account right from their own account on the AI chatbot.
OpenAI will send the parents a notification if their child’s accounted is delinked from theirs.
Once the accounts are connected, ChatGPT will start taking additional safety measures which will include showing reduced graphic content, viral challenges, sexual, romantic or violent roleplay, and extreme beauty ideals in order to “help keep their experience age-appropriate”.
Parents will be able to perform the following functions after connecting to their teen’s account:
Set quiet hours, or specific times when ChatGPT can’t be used.
Turn off voice mode, to remove the option to use voice mode in ChatGPT.
Turn off memory, so ChatGPT won’t save and use memories when responding.
Remove image generation, so ChatGPT won’t have the ability to create or edit images.
Opt out of model training, so their teen’s conversations won’t be used to improve models powering ChatGPT.
OpenAI will notify parents:
OpenAI will notify parents in times of distress such as when the AI recognizes that the teen may be thinking about harming themselves.
“If our systems detect potential harm, a small team of specially trained people reviews the situation. If there are signs of acute distress, we will contact parents by email, text message and push alert on their phone, unless they have opted out.” the company explained in its blogpost.
