OpenAI and AARP’s OATS Bring ChatGPT Safety Workshops to 1,000 Older Adults

OpenAI Academy and Older Adults Technology Services from AARP are holding free, in-person ChatGPT workshops for 1,000 older adults in 10 U.S. communities. The Older Adults AI Skills Jam is designed to help participants use the chatbot for everyday tasks while recognizing online-safety risks.

The event, held September 16, is the latest part of a multi-year effort between OpenAI and OATS, an AARP organization, through the Senior Planet program. Its premise is practical: an older adult might use ChatGPT to plan travel, make sense of a confusing bill or letter, explore a hobby, or stay connected with family. The sessions are meant to provide hands-on support for doing those things confidently and safely.

The program arrives as OpenAI says use among older people is rising. In the United States, the company says the share of ChatGPT messages associated with people 55 and older increased from 6% to nearly 10% over one year. That is a measure of message share, not a count of people or an independent assessment of how well they use the tool.

1,000Older adults the workshops aim to reach

OpenAI and OATS say the workshops will reach 1,000 older adults across 10 U.S. communities.

6%U.S. ChatGPT message share associated with people 55+

OpenAI says the share rose from 6% to nearly 10% in one year.

Safety is not an add-on to the workshops. The curriculum asks participants to identify familiar signs of a possible scam, including urgency, demands for secrecy, and suspicious links. It also promotes a simple response before reacting to a questionable message: pause, think, and ask.

• Language that pressures someone to act immediately.
• Requests to keep a conversation secret.
• Links that appear suspicious.

OpenAI says people ask ChatGPT for help evaluating suspicious messages, emails, and websites tens of millions of times each week. The workshops put that reported use case into a structured learning setting: ChatGPT is presented as an additional layer of scrutiny and prevention alongside the participant’s own judgment about a possible scam.

The 10 participating communities include Senior Planet locations in Denver, Miami, San Antonio, Montgomery County and Queens, plus local partners in St. Louis, the Twin Cities, Nashville, Fresno and Boise. That local network gives the effort a route into existing organizations serving older adults, rather than asking participants to learn through an online-only program.

OpenAI says participants’ questions, ideas, and experiences will help shape future learning resources for older adults. For now, the initiative is an education program, not a new ChatGPT feature: its immediate goal is to make a general-purpose AI tool more usable for a group whose use of it, by OpenAI’s measure, is growing.