Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 18, 2024.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
OpenAI said Monday that it is partnering with Common Sense Media on an initiative designed to help teenagers understand how to use artificial intelligence safely.
“We want to figure out how to make this tool safe, accountable and widely available to teens and people who will use it as part of their educational experience,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a Common Sense event in San Francisco.
Common Sense, a nonprofit organization committed to making technology safe and accessible for children, has worked to develop an AI rating and review system for parents, children and educators to better understand the risks and benefits of the technology . Some of the questions Common Sense wants to answer include whether AI fosters a love of learning among young people, whether it respects human rights and children’s rights, and whether the technology can perpetuate the spread of misinformation.
The goal of the new partnership is to help create AI guidelines and educational materials for children, educators and parents, and to help curate GPT-branded “family-friendly” large language models (LLMs) that adhere to Common Sense classification and standards. GPT is the backbone of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, launching in late 2022.
Common Sense Media CEO Jim Steyer said in a statement that the materials developed through the partnership “will be designed to educate families and educators about the safe and responsible use of ChatGPT, so we can collectively avoid any unintended consequences of this emerging technology.”
At Monday’s event, Altman spoke briefly about the partnership and artificial intelligence more broadly, saying he hopes it will “benefit children without access” to artificial intelligence. Part of OpenAI’s mission is to “make really useful artificial intelligence available for free,” he said.
In September, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the philanthropic arm of the Craigslist founder, said it contributed $3 million to help fund a Common Sense artificial intelligence and education initiative. Newmark told CNBC at the time that some of his concerns about artificial intelligence include the possibility that bad actors could use the technology to influence the information ecosystem and contribute to social discontent.
OpenAI and Common Sense have not said how LLMs will be optimized to help educators or teenagers. Altman said LLMs customized for educational purposes could help teenagers “who want to learn about science or learn about biology.”
“I don’t think we know yet exactly how people will want to use it,” Altman said.
He added that he “would really like my 14-year-old son to use these tools” and said he envisions a world where “every teenager or every adult will have a personalized AI.”
Regarding the upcoming election and the potential risks posed by so-called deepfakes to confuse people, Altman acknowledged that AI-generated images pose problems, but said, “I think people are much more sophisticated than we think and don’t You believe every image you see.”
He talked about how OpenAI is preparing for the potential ways bad actors could use AI.
“We mounted a big response effort,” he said. “This will be monitored very closely.”
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