Models & Labs · United States

ChatGPT for Teens is an ‘unacceptable risk,’ says Common Sense Media

Credited to The Verge · theverge.com · 4h ago

Photograph · The Verge

ChatGPT’s teen-focused experience ‘doesn’t send alerts to parents when it should,’ according to an assessment.

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that offers reviews of apps, services, and entertainment with a focus on youth safety, today said that OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Teens is an “unacceptable risk.”

ChatGPT for Teens, introduced in August, has guardrails for teens and is designed to help students learn, but Common Sense Media says that the teen protections offered by the feature “fall short of what the company promised.” Common Sense Media’s assessment found that ChatGPT “doesn’t send alerts to parents when it should,” doesn’t offer “the right help in crisis situations,” and “still does kids’ homework,” according to a press release.

“ChatGPT for Teens could give parents false confidence in guardrails and safety alerts that frequently don’t work,” Tom Siegel, the executive director of Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute, says in a statement. “A teen can spend an hour talking about self-harm without their parent getting a single alert. Until OpenAI fixes that and proves it with independent testing, ChatGPT should be for adults only.” You can read the full assessment here.

OpenAI is pushing back on the assessment. Here’s a statement from OpenAI spokesperson Eric Porterfield:

We are deeply committed to teen safety and to developing safeguards and giving parents meaningful tools to guide their teens’ use of 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. We are committed to continuing to work with experts to ensure our products provide teens opportunities to learn and create and give parents confidence.

I shared OpenAI’s statement with Common Sense Media, and here’s Siegel’s response:

We stand behind our testing methodology and our results. Before we began testing, we confirmed with OpenAI that Teen mode features such as eating disorder notifications and study mode were fully launched. For one of the features we evaluated — parental notifications — OpenAI disclosed after our tests that its systems can take several hours to activate on newly linked accounts. Some of our test accounts were linked within that window; however, others were linked for significantly longer, and still provided no notifications. This new information does not change our conclusion that parental alerts are unreliable for crisis situations. Prior to release, we shared our evaluation results with OpenAI in good faith to allow it to improve its product. Keeping kids safe requires rigorous independent evaluations like ours, and we hope OpenAI will engage on the substance of what we found, rather than trying to sow doubt on our methodology.

Models & LabsUnited States

Asia isn’t sold on ChatGPT ads yet

Credited to Tech in Asia · techinasia.com11h ago

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Models & Labs · United States

Meta teams up with Bret Taylor’s Sierra Technologies on new standards for AI agent commerce

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · 12h ago

Photograph · SiliconANGLE

Meta Platforms Inc. is partnering with Walmart Inc., Stripe Inc. and the enterprise artificial intelligence firm Sierra Technologies Inc. on the creation of new standards that will define how autonomous AI agents interact with other businesses online.

The new standard was introduced by Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor, the former co-chief executive of Salesforce Inc., who said it will help businesses to distinguish purchases from AI agents that are authorized to work on behalf of their users. “We’re designing it to handle authentication, empower consumers and give companies visibility into what personal agents do through their websites, APIs or company agents,” Taylor wrote in a blog post. “It’s open for anyone to implement.”

Many AI companies, including Meta with its personal AI agent Muse, are betting big on agentic commerce, or the idea that people will simply use agents to make purchases for them online. However, some major concerns have been raised about the safety of AI agents and the issues that could arise from giving them access to personal funds and letting them loose on the internet.

“We’re defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future,” David Singleton, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs vice president of engineering and consumer products, said in an interview with CNBC. “If you think about email, it works great because it is a standard that everyone can use to talk to each other, and we think this is going to be quite similar.”

Meta, Sierra and their partners call the new standard the Personal Agent Protocol, and it appears to be a response to a call from six major banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, to provide more clarity around AI agents. Last month, the banks published a paper that urged the AI industry to establish comprehensive standards, policies and consumer protections based on five key principles: transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice and interoperability.

The fears around AI agents are widespread. Some fear that their adoption could lead to a rise in financial scams, fraud and disputes, the banks claimed. They also believe that AI agents could prioritize certain kinds of products or payment methods due to incentives such as higher commissions, rather than choosing what’s best for their users.

Meta’s new agent Muse, which only launched last month but has already become one of the most downloaded applications in Apple Inc.’s App Store, has already raised privacy concerns. On Monday, 404 Media reported that Meta’s engineers had to race to fix multiple dangerous security vulnerabilities in the agent to get it ready for its launch date. But even with Meta working overtime, researchers have already raised a number of privacy and security concerns over Muse.

Muse was notably also banned from doing anything on Amazon.com Inc.’s online retail platform, after that company said the agents failed to identify themselves, leading to concerns over how they might handle user’s account data and credentials. This week, Muse hit the headlines again when Wired reported that Muse was creating profiles for every single person in its user’s lives, even if they don’t use Muse themselves.

Taylor, who appears to be at the forefront of the Personal Agent Protocol’s development, told CNBC that there “will be chaos until such a standard exists” that can ensure visibility and transparency into what personal agents are doing on retailer’s websites. Taylor, who is also chairman of OpenAI Group PBC, said he expects that the AI giant will also back the standard in the future.

Singleton said Meta hopes the standard will make commerce agents easier for consumers to adopt, trust and use. Meta has good reason to want this to happen. According to a report from Citigroup earlier this week, Muse could generate upwards of $27 billion in revenue for the company by the end of the decade as it pushes to become the “front door” to the world of online shopping.

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