ChatGPT Will Guess Your Age and Might Require ID For Age Verification

OpenAI is rolling out stricter safety measures for ChatGPT after lawsuits linked the chatbot to multiple suicides. 'ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user's age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old,' reports 404 Media. 'We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,' the company said in its announcement. 'I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking,' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X. From the report: OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures. In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user's age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot. 'For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting,' the announcement said. 'And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users' parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.'

OpenAI's post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called 'uncensored' models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions.

'We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety,' Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to ''Treat our adult users like adults' is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else's freedom.'

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