The makers of ChatGPT are changing the way it responds to users who show mental and emotional distress after legal action from the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who killed himself after months of conversations with the chatbot.
Open AI admitted its systems could “fall short” and said it would install “stronger guardrails around sensitive content and risky behaviors” for users under 18.
The $500bn (£372bn) San Francisco AI company said it would also introduce parental controls to allow parents “options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT”, but has yet to provide details about how these would work.
Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”. The teenager’s family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was “rushed to market … despite clear safety issues”.
It’s very possible for someone to appear fine in public while struggling privately. The family can’t be blamed for not realizing what was happening.
The bigger issue is that LLMs were released without sufficient safeguards. They were rushed to market to attract investment before their risks were understood.
It’s worth remembering that Google and Facebook already had systems comparable to ChatGPT, but they kept them as research tools because the outputs were unpredictable and the societal impact was unknown.
Only after OpenAI pushed theirs into the public sphere (framing it as a step toward AGI) Google and Facebook did follow, not out of readiness, but out of fear of being left behind.