OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT parental controls to protect teens
Sept. 29 (UPI) -- OpenAI rolled out new parental controls Monday for ChatGPT to help families manage settings for their teens and receive alerts if their child is struggling emotionally.
The settings, specifically for users under the age of 18, can be customized once the teen accepts a parent's invitation and is connected to their account. The parent will be notified if the teen tries to unlink the accounts.
"These parental controls are a good starting point for parents in managing their teens ChatGPT use. Parental controls are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to keep teens safe online, though -- they work best when combined with ongoing conversations about responsible AI use, clear family rules about technology and active involvement in understanding what their teen is doing online," said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI Programs with Common Sense Media.
Parents can control their teen's ChatGPT use through a "simple control page," which allows them to set quiet hours or turn off the voice mode, according to OpenAI.
Adults can also turn off the memory, so ChatGPT will not save and use memories when responding. Parents can remove image generation, so ChatGPT will not be able to create or edit images. And they can opt out of model training, to prevent teen's conversations from being used to improve models powering ChatGPT.
Open AI's most significant safety upgrade notifies parents -- by email, text or push alert -- if ChatGPT detects a teen is considering harming themselves. OpenAI said it worked with mental health and teen experts to design this feature and opted to err on the side of caution in determining if there is something wrong.
"We think it's better to act and alert a parent so they can step in than to stay silent," the company said.
OpenAI is currently facing a wrongful death lawsuit after a 16-year-old boy spent months interacting with ChatGPT before committing suicide. The teen's parents allege ChatGPT stockpiles "intimate personal details" about users to "foster psychological dependency." According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT -- which mimics human conversations and is estimated to have weekly users in excess of 700 million -- gave the teen step-by-step instructions on how to end his life and even offered to draft a suicide note.
"As we previously mentioned, when conversations touch on sensitive and emotional topics the system may switch mid-chat to a reasoning model or GPT-5 designed to handle these contexts with extra care," Nick Turley, vice president and head of the ChatGPT app, wrote in a post on X. "This is similar to how we route conversations that require extra thinking to our reasoning models."
While OpenAI is working to keep teens safe, some tech experts criticized the organization's overly cautious controls that redirect harmful conversations instead of validating users' thinking.
On Monday, OpenAI rolled out a new, easy-access parent resource page to explain how the new controls work.
The tech company is currently working on an age prediction system to determine on its own whether a user is under the age of 18, allowing ChatGPT to apply teen-appropriate settings without parents.
If you or someone you know is suicidal, help is available at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
