OpenAI’s “ChatGPT for Teens” Is an “Unsafe” Mess, Testing Finds

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OpenAI says its “ChatGPT for Teens” is safe for users aged 13 to 17. A new report found that it isn’t.

A new report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute found that guardrails in ChatGPT for Teens, a version of OpenAI’s flagship chatbot that the company says is designed to encourage a “focus on learning and even stronger built-in protections” for under-18 users, aren’t functioning as marketed — and as a result, the reviewers argue, the feature is “unsafe” and poses an “unacceptable risk” to teens.

“Parents, if they take the press release and all of the announcements about this product at face value, are going to hear three things. They’re going to hear this chatbot will tell you if your kid is in trouble, this chatbot will not act like your kid’s friend, and this chatbot is going to do a better job of helping your kid with learning — it’s not just going to do their homework for them,” Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at at Common Sense Media, told Futurism. “Our testing shows that across all three of those dimensions, this chatbot, this new version of ChatGPT for Teens, isn’t actually acting that differently than the previous version of ChatGPT… and that’s not going to be apparent to a parent.”