Parents will soon be able to manage how their children interact with ChatGPT.
OpenAI, the company responsible for the creation of the artificial intelligence program, announced in a blog post on Tuesday that parental controls will be available “within the next month.” The feature will allow parents to link their teenagers’ ChatGPT accounts to their own, control ChatGPT’s responses with behavioral parameters, choose whether to disable certain features such as memory and chat history, and be notified if the app detects that teens are experiencing distress.
“Many young people are already using AI. They are among the first ‘AI natives,’ growing up with these tools as part of daily life, much like earlier generations did with the internet or smartphones. That creates real opportunities for support, learning, and creativity, but it also means families and teens may need support in setting healthy guidelines that fit a teen’s unique stage of development,” OpenAI said in its blog post.
“These steps are only the beginning. We will continue learning and strengthening our approach, guided by experts, with the goal of making ChatGPT as helpful as possible,” OpenAI continued.
The upcoming change comes just after parents recently filed a lawsuit accusing ChatGPT of encouraging their teenage son, Adam Raine, to commit suicide. Raine had been using a previous model of the app, GPT-4o, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself said was “too sycophantic.”
