Dinowitz questions companies on AI harms to K-12 students

Thank you, Madam Chair.

As chair of the Committee on Education, as a former teacher, as a parent, I am deeply concerned with the impact of AI on our kids.

Large language models impacting their cognitive development and raising a generation of students who can't independently read.

All right.

What is your commitment to severely restricting the output of your large language models for students in grades K to 12, which right now are easy to circumvent, to prevent both emotional dependence and essay writing?

And given the unique nature of...

The individualized essay writing that your models do, are you willing to subject yourself to the guardrails we have in New York State which prohibit

an adult from writing essays for students and selling it to them or getting value from them?

And then as we see

AI proliferate in the classroom.

We've also seen your models

cheat in order to fulfill a goal.

And so if you have an AI model whose goal is to get a student, improve student outcomes, what is preventing those models from hacking into student databases to manipulate grades to achieve that goal of improving, in quotation marks, student achievement?

And it's Ms.

Dwyer first, I believe.

Yeah, thank you for your question.

So first of all, OpenAI takes youth safety very seriously.

We recently released a product, ChatGPT for Teens, for users only between the ages of 13 and 17.

So users below the age of 13 are not allowed to use our products.

ChatGPT for teens is safe by default.

That means that there are protections for harmful content, things like eating disorders, violence, suicide, and self-harm.

There's also voluntary parental controls so that parents can take additional steps to protect their children.

And I'm happy to say that OpenAI not only takes our responsibility to protect kids seriously, we also support legislation to hold us accountable to that responsibility.

We recently endorsed, I think, the strongest in the nation youth safety legislation in California, SB 111.

19 to require strong safeguards for teens 13 to 17 and to hold companies accountable.

And your models restrict, they do not write entire essays for kids.

Again, our models are not allowed to be used by kids under the age of 13.

13 to 18.

Okay, we'll move on to Mr.

Cahill.

And to remember, thank you very much for this question.

Absolutely, absolutely recognize your deep concern in relation to the potential impact of AI on teams and miners.

Meta is absolutely committed.

It's an imperative to us to providing safe and responsible AI, especially for teams.

We have default protections, and I just wanted to clarify as well that Meta AI is a 13 product, so it's just 13 onwards.

So I was talking about age-appropriate interactions.

So, for example, content that teens would experience wouldn't be out of place in a 13-plus movie, for example.

We also have suicide and self-harm resources.

We also have parental controls to give parents more oversight.

And we do not permit our AI offerings to engage in romantic interactions or sexual interactions with minors.

I appreciate that answer.

I do want to highlight the part of the question, which was that the cognitive development of our students includes the mental health, and it also includes things like

composition of essays, term papers, which your model still can provide directly to our students.

So I'm also asking about your commitment to severely restricting the outputs, not just for their mental health well-being, but for their cognitive development.

So I want to make sure that question is answered as part of this.

Thank you, Chair.

Can you all answer that question for our education chair?

Shane, do you want to continue?

Yep.

No, I'm happy to take that and then I'll hand off to you, Alice.

The issue that I think you're raising in relation to council member, in relation to cognitive strength or the impact on cognitive abilities is something that we absolutely

are taking.

Taking seriously in terms of being committed to providing safe and responsible AI again, especially in relation to teams.

Thank you.

Who's missing?

Okay, one more friend.

Go ahead.

Yeah, I'm next.

So, sir, I would highlight not only that we work very hard with both internal and external experts in the fields of child safety and development and education.

We also see AI as a valuable tool for young people to prepare them, not only for the skills they're going to need for an AI-driven future, but it's also a very powerful learning tool.

We're particularly excited about personalized tutoring that's available with AI tools.

We also are very excited about AI's ability to support educators themselves.

We know our educators are overtaxed, particularly with administrative burdens.

And so if our AI tools can support teachers in everything from, you know, scheduling to planning lesson plans, to also thinking about how to tailor their educational plans to individual students,

we're very happy to support that.

We also think it's very important for parents and educators to have control over how they use AI in classrooms.

And how their kids have access to AI.

You know, every family is different, every student is different.

What's useful for one student may not be useful for another.

So through tools like Gemini Workspace for Education, we enable school administrators to control students'accounts access to Gemini apps so that their students are using

using Gemini in the ways that their educators can see are best.

We're going to have to dig more into these questions.

The chair doesn't feel like we've answered all the questions.

We'll come back.

This is an important topic for all of us.

I'm going to disrupt the lineup because our public advocate is here, and he wants to ask a question.

Public advocate, go ahead.