Over the past few months, OpenAI has received backlash over a series of events where conversations with ChatGPT resulted in a human tragedy. In the wake of the incidents and the looming threat of AI chatbot regulations, OpenAI has finally rolled out the promised parental controls that would allow parents to ensure that their wards’ interactions are safe.
What’s the big shift?
The first line of defense is content safety. OpenAI says parents will have the power to “add extra safeguards to help protect teens, such as graphic content and viral challenges.” Additionally, they can also decide to turn on or off the chatbot’s memory, which allows it to remember previous conversations.
Next, parents will have the flexibility to specify a usage window by setting “quiet hours” in which ChatGPT can’t be accessed. Finally, guardians can choose to disable the conversational voice mode, and even shut off image creation and editing.
Notably, parents won’t be able to see the conversations of teenage users. But in rare cases where the system detects “signs of serious safety risk,” they will be warned about it. OpenAI has also launched a full-fledged resource page with instructions and guidelines to set parental controls.
The open-ended problem
In order to enable the aforementioned safety controls, parents must link their accounts to their teenage children’s ChatGPT accounts. This can be done by sending an invite link via email or text message.
Once the link is accepted by the teen user to connect the accounts, guardians can set up the safety controls mentioned above. But do keep in mind that the whole process is opt-in, and teen users can choose to unlink their accounts and end the supervision at any time.
Parents will be notified about the unliking step, notes OpenAI. The bigger concern is that young users can easily circumvent these limitations by setting up another account to use ChatGPT without any restrictions. Moreover, if their parents monitor the user accounts registered on a phone, teen users can simply log in with a burner account and use the web version.
