Mother accuses OpenAI of exploiting kids

Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Five Card Shuffle

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Pratt, John B. (John Burnett), 1798-1869 · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

A mother filed a class action against OpenAI Tuesday, alleging the company sidesteps parental consent so children can use ChatGPT, then mines the resulting conversations to train its models. Her complaint describes a 12-year-old asking the bot to critique her face and a 16-year-old leaning on it for homework and relationship advice, with the chatbot allegedly mirroring their slang and validating their feelings to keep them talking.

OpenAI says parental permission is required for minors; the complaint says in practice a name and a checked box is the entire verification system. The suit, which seeks an equity stake in OpenAI or its cash equivalent, arrives as the company seeks funding at a reported $1.4 trillion valuation. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

The filing follows similar suits against Meta, Google and others over alleged child-addiction design, one of which already produced a $6 million jury verdict in a bellwether case among roughly 2,500 pending plaintiffs.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A checkbox that asks a child to confirm she is not a child is not a safety system, it is a formality dressed up to look like one. Companies worth over a trillion dollars can afford better locks on the henhouse than a dotted line nobody checks. If the courts start treating 'we said we required consent' the same way they'd treat a padlock made of cardboard, a lot of terms-of-service pages are going to need rewriting.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Five Card Shuffle · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0