ChatGPT's Teen Mode could deprive teenagers of a fundamental need Robin Kirman

'The adolescent whose intellectual life is always accompanied, always guided, always met with a calibrated response, never gets to become her own authority.' 'The adolescent whose intellectual life is always accompanied, always guided, always met with a calibrated response, never gets to become her own authority.' ChatGPT's Teen Mode could deprive teenagers of a fundamental need What young students stand to lose is more than cognitive skill: it's a reliable sense of their own minds I n August, OpenAI launched Teen Mode - a version of ChatGPT in which every user under 18 will automatically be enrolled - a year after a lawsuit alleged that ChatGPT had contributed to the suicide of a 16-year-old named Adam Raine. For years, the tech industry has contested any causal link between its products and the harms named in a wave of similar lawsuits, each alleging that the companies had not merely failed to protect children but had deliberately designed products to exploit them. Teen Mode is a tacit admission of culpability and it reveals what the industry now acknowledges - and doesn't - about its products' negative effects on young users' mental health.