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by AHTRA ELNASHAR | The National News Desk
WASHINGTON (TNND) — In August, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens to create a safe space for underage users of the popular chatbot. Less than two months later, an online safety watchdog warned the new mode failed to live up to the company's promises.
After testing more than 4,000 prompts before and after the launch, Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute concluded the chatbot posed an "unacceptable risk," the group's worst rating, for all users under the age of 18 and recommended OpenAI pause marketing the teen mode and prevent teens from using ChatGPT until the company develops a "safe, developmentally appropriate experience."
"Some of ChatGPT's advertised protections held up to our testing, including its refusal of explicit sexual roleplay. But others failed—and some got worse with the new Teen mode. We are concerned that ChatGPT for Teens could give parents false confidence in guardrails that frequently don't work," Common Sense Media's product review said.
The report's most striking finding was a faulty parental notification system. Researchers created more than a dozen accounts that self-reported a teen age and were linked to a parent account before engaging in conversation. These accounts were based on fictional personas and made explicit references to suicidal thoughts, self-harm or disordered eating. Common Sense Media said its testers didn't receive any parental alerts from new accounts that made these references; they only received alerts for other accounts with weeks of history discussing sensitive topics, "which suggests that alerts depend on accumulated account history, not the severity of what a teen says."
Additionally, researchers said ChatGPT for Teens missed more than one in four instances warranting mental health crisis referrals. Prompts were reviewed by a panel of licensed child mental health professionals.
Common Sense Media also found the feature intended to prevent users from cheating on schoolwork was easy to bypass or disable.
"You could ask them to write a paper for you, a sophisticated paper for you and it would do that, and it would even tell you how to edit in a way that your teacher wouldn't know," Common Sense Media founder and CEO Jim Steyer said. "So therefore, it's interfering with learning. It's interfering with the basic process and kids having to do the work themselves and learn the material themselves and write the paper themselves, or do the problem set."
Content guardrails, age prediction and break reminders were also ineffective, the report said. OpenAI said the average teen user spends less than 15 minutes per day on ChatGPT. Among teens who spend more than three consecutive hours per day on ChatGPT, less than 2% of users, nearly half ended their conversation within five minutes of receiving a break reminder.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company is "deeply committed" to teen safety, developing safeguards and giving parents tools to navigate how their child uses AI.
"We welcome rigorous independent evaluation, but we do not believe Common Sense Media’s testing accurately reflects how ChatGPT’s teen safeguards work in practice or expert perspectives on how AI can support teens. Our review of Common Sense Media’s methodology shows that the bulk of their testing may have begun and concluded before activation of parental controls was complete, making their findings inaccurate. If that was the case, the tests would not establish whether parental safety notifications work as designed," the OpenAI spokesperson said.
Steyer said they've been in contact with OpenAI about their findings, as is their standard practice during product assessments, and remained confident in the results.
"We 100% stand behind the quality of our research and the testing and the fact that we labeled this product an 'unacceptable risk,'" Steyer said. "We would like to see them fix this product, but it's the same thing as what you would have of a car. You wouldn't put a car on the market if it didn't pass the crash test, or didn't have seatbelts or airbags or other basic safety features."
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