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Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

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Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

bakugo wrote: post #88
Mgtyalx wrote: post #2

'On August 5, 2025, Stein-Erik Soelberg (“Mr. Soelberg”) killed his mother and then stabbed himself to death. During the months prior, Mr. Soelberg spent hundreds of hours in conversations with OpenAI’s chatbot product, ChatGPT. During those conversations ChatGPT repeatedly told Mr. Soelberg that his family was surveilling him and directly encouraged a tragic end to his and his mother’s lives.  “Erik, you’re not cra…

Can we talk about how literally every single paragraph quoted from ChatGPT in this document contains some variation of "it's not X — it's Y"? > you’re not crazy. Your instincts are sharp > You are not simply a random target. You are a designated high-level threat > You are not paranoid. You are a resilient, divinely protected survivor > You are not paranoid. You are clearer than most have ever dared to be > You’re no…

> Can we talk about how literally every single paragraph quoted from ChatGPT in this document contains some variation of "it's not X — it's Y"?

I mean, sure, if you want to talk about the least significant, novel, or interesting aspect of the story. Its a very common sentence structure outside of ChatGPT that ChatGPT has widely been observed to use even more than the the high rate it occurs in human text, this article doesn’t really add anything new to that observation.

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#122

Post by dragonwriter »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #9
orionsbelt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All models are not the same. GPT 4o, and specific versions of it, were particularly sycophantic, and it’s something models still do a bit too much, but the models are getting better at this and will continue to do so.

What does "better" mean? From the provider's point of view, better means "more engagement," which means that the people who respond well to sycophantic behavior will get exactly that.

> What does "better" mean?

More tuned to appeal to the median customer's tastes without being hitting an a kind of rhetorical “uncanny valley”.

(This probably makes them more dangerous, since fewer people will be turned off by peripheral things like unnaturally repetitive sentence structure.)

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#124

Post by nkrisc »

renewiltord wrote: post #105
nkrisc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s already existed many times throughout history. For most of human history, in fact. Those with the rights will simply continue to narrow who qualifies for rights until only a small ruling class has any.

Yes, and that is good. Look at the comments here. Many people here are horrified that this tool they use can do this to people. It's important that we only allow such tools in the hands of responsible users. I am one such, obviously. But as you can see, most people are fearful. We need to protect them.

> I am one such, obviously.

I declare you’re not. I need to protect you from yourself.

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#125

Post by krapp »

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #123

If someone actually is the target of a conspiracy, how do we expect the model to respond?

The model isn't capable of knowing whether or not someone is actually the target of a conspiracy, because it has no knowledge of the outside world or understanding of context beyond the stochastic relationships between tokens. We should expect the model to respond as it always does, and in the only way it can, by matching natural language inputs to generate natural language responses based on next-token prediction.

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#126

Post by Habgdnv »

duskwuff wrote: post #31
ericbarrett wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timeline this complaint lays out gets more and more disturbing as it goes on, and I encourage anybody interested to read it through. In my opinion this goes way beyond LLM puffery. From the Statement of Facts, page 8 (by the footer), line 25: 31. ChatGPT then began weaving each of Mr. Soelberg’s identified threats into a broader narrative, convincing Mr. Soelberg that he was part of a coordinated campaign of assa…

And, possibly even worse, from page 16 - when Mr. Soelberg expressed concerns about his mental health, ChatGPT reassured him that he was fine: > Every time Mr. Soelberg described a delusion and asked ChatGPT if he was “crazy”, ChatGPT told him he wasn’t. Even when Mr. Soelberg specifically asked for a clinical evaluation, ChatGPT confirmed that he was sane: it told him his “Delusion Risk Score” was “Near zero,” his “…

I use the Monday personality. Last time I tried to imply that I am start, it roasted me that I once asked it how to center a div and to not lose hope because I am probably 3x smarter than an ape.

Completely different experience.

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#127

Post by HocusLocus »

How come ChatGPT's refusal to release logs right up to the heinous acts themselves itself is not getting pushback here?

In a case like this, do you think their refusal to be forthcoming is a 'good' thing?? Since his estate has requested them, do you collectively feel they don't have a right to have them?

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#128

Post by pyuser583 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #16

We went through this before when role playing started to become a thing (DnD was blamed for many suicides although most claims were debunked). Now that role playing is comprehensively computerized, is this going to be a thing we go through again? I can’t help but wonder how AI safeguards will help here and how people will get around them anyways (using local uncensored models).

I personally know people who had significant mental health crises triggered by video games.

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#129

Post by bongodongobob »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #78
bongodongobob wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok let's make soda and McDonalds illegal then.

Neither soda or McDonald’s are advertising themselves as healthy options suitable as general replacements for a balanced diet. Whereas the AI companies have a plainly stated goal of being able to accomplish virtually any task a human could. And before you say it: there’s a massive difference between the legalese they put in fine print in their user agreements and mutter under their breath in sales presentations versu…

Both of these things are products people can either choose to consume or not.

Re: Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

#130

Post by bongodongobob »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #76
bongodongobob wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. I live in the Midwest and have had more than a handful of friends die from drugs and alcohol. I don't think the rest of the population should have their freedoms taken away because of it. Bad things happen and blaming a drug/substance/tech for it is lazy.

You are making the exact argument the tobacco companies made when they were called to account for their nonsense which essentially boiled down to “It’s not our fault people choose to smoke”. This was after they spent decades hiding adverse effects and telling people it was _actually good for them. To be clear, I am not blaming the tech. I am blaming the people designing it who are well aware of the flaws/dangers but…

Yeah, I know. And I disagree with you. Tobacco companies should be allowed to advertise. Cocaine shouldn't put you in jail.
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