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Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#91

Post by krapp »

autumnstwilight wrote: post #86
kylecazar wrote: post #63

"Sewell, like many children his age, did not have the maturity or mental capacity to understand that the C.AI bot, in the form of Daenerys, was not real" How? Seriously, how? Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part -- but I grew up before AI and chatbots, and I'm certain I would understand it isn't real. I'm baffled by people engaging with these things for entertainment/companionship purposes.

Intellectually a 14 year old should certainly be able to understand the difference between a chatbot and a human, but there's a subset of emotionally unstable people (mostly teenagers) who become extremely attached to characters that are not real. There was an active subcommunity on Tumblr that believed they had a form of multiple personality disorder in which fictional characters were real, living inside their heads…

There are adult professional ersatz intellectual elites on Hacker News who refuse to recognize any meaningful difference between a chatbot and a human. A horny teenage boy doesn't stand a chance.

Everyone is up in arms about the effect of social media on emotional and mental health but that's nothing compared to LLMs that are designed to gaslight people into relating to software (and the corporations behind them) as sentient beings and to form intimate emotional bonds through natural language which can be easily exploited and manipulated. That's hacking our primate brains at a deeper level than Mark Zuckerberg could ever have dreamed of reaching.

We can't just write this off as simply the consequence of lonely parasocial people who can't tell fantasy from reality. Not when we're entering an era for which the primary interface with technology will be parasociality and fantasy.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#94

Post by danpalmer »

autumnstwilight wrote: post #50

I am mildly to moderately critical of generative AI and how it's being marketed, but the root issue here seems to be existing suicidal ideation. The bot didn't initiate talk of suicide and told him not to do it when he brought it up directly. It seems it wasn't capable of detecting euphemistic references to suicide and therefore responded as if roleplaying about meeting in person. That said, I think this should throw…

As for whether it wasn’t capable of detecting euphemistic references, that feels sort of beside the point to me. It was role playing about meeting in person because that’s what the product was - role play. The whole point, and marketing of the product is around doing that.

We probably just shouldn’t sell echo chambers to children, regardless of whether they are AI based or human.

With hindsight, or sufficient emotional intelligence and context about an individual’s life beyond the role play it may be possible to conclude that someone is at risk, but honestly I’m not even sure that a person doing this role play online would have necessarily figured it out.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#95

Post by xk_id »

krapp wrote: post #91
autumnstwilight wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intellectually a 14 year old should certainly be able to understand the difference between a chatbot and a human, but there's a subset of emotionally unstable people (mostly teenagers) who become extremely attached to characters that are not real. There was an active subcommunity on Tumblr that believed they had a form of multiple personality disorder in which fictional characters were real, living inside their heads…

There are adult professional ersatz intellectual elites on Hacker News who refuse to recognize any meaningful difference between a chatbot and a human. A horny teenage boy doesn't stand a chance. Everyone is up in arms about the effect of social media on emotional and mental health but that's nothing compared to LLMs that are designed to gaslight people into relating to software (and the corporations behind them) as…

Well articulated, but this thesis hinges on a critical mass of people not being able to see through it. I might be underestimating how manipulable the average consumer is, but for now I think this vision of the future is just a VC wet dream.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#96

Post by ahahahahah »

sys64739 wrote: post #66
dekhn wrote: post #54

McLuhan's 27th law, amended: if there is a new thing, journalists will find a case of suicide to blame on the new thing, regardless of any prior existing conditions.

Read the article, the kid's spiral coincided with him hooking up with eDanerys. The chatbot kept agitating the kid to commit suicide, too

The agitations there are certainly rather mild. The parents are out sharing the worst examples they could find, and there's nothing really that damning or explicit. The parents noticing it coincided with his use of the ai (though in reality that connection probably was made after the fact), but also that time period was when the boy was 13 and into 14, it's a common time for significant behavioral changes.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#97

Post by happytoexplain »

dekhn wrote: post #54

McLuhan's 27th law, amended: if there is a new thing, journalists will find a case of suicide to blame on the new thing, regardless of any prior existing conditions.

Reading the article, there's not enough evidence for your assertion about the author's integrity to warrant a cutesy, sarcastic tone considering the gravity of the topic (a child's suicide). There would have to be a lot.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#98

Post by princevegeta89 »

autumnstwilight wrote: post #86
kylecazar wrote: post #63

"Sewell, like many children his age, did not have the maturity or mental capacity to understand that the C.AI bot, in the form of Daenerys, was not real" How? Seriously, how? Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part -- but I grew up before AI and chatbots, and I'm certain I would understand it isn't real. I'm baffled by people engaging with these things for entertainment/companionship purposes.

Intellectually a 14 year old should certainly be able to understand the difference between a chatbot and a human, but there's a subset of emotionally unstable people (mostly teenagers) who become extremely attached to characters that are not real. There was an active subcommunity on Tumblr that believed they had a form of multiple personality disorder in which fictional characters were real, living inside their heads…

I agree with you. I may or may not be on the spectrum but I do have other features like OCD and ADHD. When I was 14 I was extremely attached to fictional characters and movie characters - to the point of spending entire days imagining the world with them and living in that imaginary world. I can see how someone can get absorbed into that world even more and more - and we're talking about today's world where there are massively many more options and risk factors from social media, AI to video games etc.

This is also exactly why parental intervention is the key to make sure kids swerve away from these meaningless things as much as possible, so that they spend time with the real-world and real people instead.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#100

Post by [deleted] »

kylecazar wrote: post #63

"Sewell, like many children his age, did not have the maturity or mental capacity to understand that the C.AI bot, in the form of Daenerys, was not real" How? Seriously, how? Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part -- but I grew up before AI and chatbots, and I'm certain I would understand it isn't real. I'm baffled by people engaging with these things for entertainment/companionship purposes.

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