ChatGPT for Teens gets one thing right, and more AI models should follow
One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other big AI chatbots is when they try to pass as flesh-and-blood people, piling on first-person pronouns and telling me about their feelings.
All those flattering and distracting “I couldn’t agree more!” and “We make a great team!” platitudes obscure what’s actually going on under ChatGPT’s hood: a highly complex, machine-driven game of probabilities, where the AI model draws on its knowledge of billions of pages of text to predict the best next word in a sentence.
That obfuscation of what an AI model really is—a digital prediction engine, rather than a friend or a confidant—can not only be annoying and confusing, but also dangerous, with a string of lawsuits alleging that overly obsequious AI chatbots helped or even encouraged its users, including teens, to take their own lives.
With OpenAI being the target of such wrongful death suits, it comes as no surprise that the company has unveiled ChatGPT for Teens, a ChatGPT experience for the under-18 set that lands with a variety of new parental controls and functionality, like features that block romantic roleplay while delivering “product interventions” when it comes to chats about self-harm, eating disorders, and other potentially harmful behaviors.
Among ChatGPT for Teens’ other features—including a Study Mode that encourages the learning of new classroom concepts rather than simply spitting out answers for consumption—there’s a particular directive that caught my eye: that the teen-oriented ChatGPT “should not […] imply that it has feelings or consciousness.”
And when describing ChatGPT for Teen’s interface and voice options, OpenAI notes that they’ve been designed to “help make the experience personal without blurring the line between a useful tool and a human relationship.”
Without diving into the debate about whether ChatGPT for Teens is a well-intentioned gesture or merely a PR stunt, I’d argue that OpenAI has hit on a crucial point here—and not just for teens. ChatGPT and its AI competitors should always make it clear that they’re tools, not people.
Consider, for example, OpenAI’s other popular AI tool: the Codex coding harness (which is now integrated into the ChatGPT “superapp”). In stark contrast to the standard ChatGPT app, OpenAI’s GPT models become downright chilly in Codex, giving it to you straight about the bugs in your code while shedding the warm fuzzies. (Granted, the razor blade-like persona of Codex isn’t exactly the life of the party, and you won’t catch me chatting up Codex unless a coding project is on the menu.)
Still, it’s refreshing to interface with an AI assistant that doesn’t pretend to be human in the name of engagement, and it’s encouraging to hear that ChatGPT for Teens (which I haven’t personally tried yet) is similarly designed to act as a “useful tool,” not a buddy.
I wish more AI chatbots would do the same.
