Does ChatGPT’s Latest Decision Put Students at Risk?

OpenAI released a major change to ChatGPT-3.5 on Monday, and it is poised to have some concerning unintended consequences.

This week OpenAI removed the need to create an account or log in when accessing its free AI chatbot, which allows users to immediately start chatting with ChatGPT.

The version of ChatGPT has additional content guardrails in place - although it’s not clear what these are. There are also some tradeoffs in functionality - you can’t save chats or take advantage of some other features like voice conversations. Conversations are still used for training the model unless opted-out.

This change paves the way for more widespread adoption globally and lower barriers to experimentation.

But removing all gating also creates enormous risk for our young people as there are no restrictions for those under 13 or teens without parental permission other than the Terms of Service.

This is an example of what might seem like a relatively simple update focused on increasing adoption and lowering friction, but one that brings considerable risks to our young people that access these tools without any guidance or oversight. We have seen how this has played out before with social media platforms, so we are hopeful that OpenAI will make some changes to mitigate these potential harms.

What do you think about the benefits and the risks of this move?