00:00 Speaker A

What exactly is chat GPT for for teens and how is it different than what millions of others are already using?

00:05 Speaker B

It’s basically the kind of response that Open AI is having towards kind of questions about safety when it comes to, you know, these chatbots or, you know, AI apps, uh, and teens, you know, uh, there has been various reports about, uh, people claiming that, uh, they’ve led to, uh, uh, relationships between AI and and teens where, you know, they, uh, people have become delusional over time, but teens, uh, have gone on to self-harm, uh, that the chatbots have given them kind of steps on how to do that or encouraged them in certain instances, uh, to to perform acts like that. And so, you know, this is kind of a response to that, as well as the the fear that, uh, about those weird kind of relationships that teens may form with with their chatbots, whether that’s romanticizing them or otherwise. Uh and so it’s it’s a way for them to still offer the product without having to cut an entire population off. And obviously, teens are an important cohort when it comes to tech companies because, you know, you hook someone young, they’ll stay with you for a a long period of time. Uh and, you know, I mean, I’m pretty sure any company will tell you that.

01:25 Speaker A

How does Open AI know if the user is in fact a teenager?

01:31 Speaker B

It could be based on patterns, uh, or it could be based on them just logging in and being truthful about who they are, right? And so, you know, they’ll obviously kind of default them to teen mode, uh, if they’re under 18, uh, and then, you know, there’s a certain number of things that are disallowed within those accounts, um, and certain, you know, uh, guard rails that are put into place that you wouldn’t have if you or I were using it. Although I probably should use a teen account because my brain’s like a 15-year-old still. So, um, but it is, it is one of those things where, you know, they’re, they’re actively seemingly trying to, uh, show that they’re, they’re working to, to reduce these kinds of harms that they’ve seen.

02:11 Speaker A

What, what, what would teenagers be prevented from seeing Dan? Like under this, what’s the kind of content that the 13-year-old wouldn’t look at? Wouldn’t see?

02:18 Speaker B

Yeah, I mean anything that’s like, you know, uh sexual content, uh that kind of self-harm content. Uh, there’s a number of of things that you can pull up on chat. It’s just basically the internet, right? And so if you’re having a conversation there, you may end up down some kind of disturbing rabbit hole, right? And so the idea is to prevent them from being able to go down those rabbit holes and, you know, say, okay, well this is a 13 year old, they shouldn’t be, you know, reading about this or, you know, being pointed to uh websites about this. And so that’s kind of the the hope here. Um, and we’ve seen other companies, you know, try to implement these kind of, you know, controls for teens. it it it is difficult to do though when you can kind of, you know, spoof who you are and how old you are. I mean, you know, when uh age gating came around, uh, I mean, I guess decades ago when I was, you know, uh, I guess a teenager and I would try to like check out like an R-rated movie trailer or something like that, you know, you just put in, I was born in 1950. It’s like, well, no, I was born in 85. I’ve, you know, a teenager, but you know, so you can it’s not as simple as that anymore, but there are ways where you can still kind of spoof your age when you sign up.

03:32 Speaker A

Why do you think, by the way, Sam Altman is doing this right now?

03:36 Speaker B

Yeah, I mean, I think it has to do with all that negative press primarily, but then obviously there’s these huge trials that are going on across the social media landscape. And so, you know, these, I think we’re at a place as a society where we’re saying, okay, so what happens when these when when these apps are accused of or or there are claims that these apps are hurting younger populations. What happens, you know, do do we take action? Is there legal action? Is there, uh, some kind of, uh, political action that that goes into effect? And I think, you know, Open AI, uh, Chat GBT and, you know, Anthropic and Google, they’ve all exploded, their their AI chatbots have exploded in popularity so quickly, it’s in tandem with this. I think they’re saying, oh, well, we better get our ducks in a row because obviously, if we allow these kinds of things to exist and these reports continue to come out, then we’re going to find ourselves in a lot of trouble.