ChatGPT’s Teen Mode could deprive teenagers of a fundamental need

In August, OpenAI launched Teen Mode – a version of ChatGPT in which every user under 18 will automatically be enrolled , El.kz cites the Guardian.

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.

As a psychoanalyst who works with young people, I’ve been observing, up close, the impact of social media and AI on their psychological development: how these tools influence not only behavior or mood at the day-to-day level, but identity formation and character.

Teen mode may address some of the harms done to teenagers. A deeper one remains.

At the surface level, Teen Mode seeks to prevent some of the more obvious harms to young users: it provides guardrails against destructive content, parent notifications for self-harm concerns, and a prohibition on presenting itself as a friend, claiming personal feelings, or suggesting it is anything other than a tool. That last restriction is a direct response to the Character.AI wrongful death case, in which a fourteen-year-old formed an intense attachment to a chatbot.

There’s a growing awareness that it’s not only the content AI delivers but the way AI behaves that can cause harm, and that recognition seems to have driven the design of another feature: Study Mode, Teen Mode’s built-in learning tool.

Recent research has confirmed what we already knew: that versions of AI that simply do the work for kids produce short-term grade improvements that collapse the moment the tool is removed, leaving students worse off than if they’d never used it. Study Mode is meant to yield gains that will hold.

Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice-president for education, calls it a transformation from “a straightforward answer engine into a cognitive tutor”. Socratic in approach, the feature refuses to supply answers, requiring the student to do much of the thinking herself.

Teen Mode offers something genuinely new: accessible to any student with a phone, it gently pushes back on easy answers and creates rather than forecloses the discomfort of not-yet-knowing. For a teenager without access to a tutor or a teacher with time for her questions, a Socratic companion can offer a real democratization of intellectually rigorous support – and one that surpasses, in scope of knowledge and availability, what any human source could provide.

Where tutors eventually go home, and parents get frustrated, or simply have other things to do, Teen Mode is a tireless interlocutor – arguably, the only invention in human history capable of sustaining infinite patience with a teen.

Which is to say: it is, structurally, the too-good parent. And that is precisely where the problem begins.