Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
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Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#2Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#3Not a lawyer.
While AI is not a real human, brain, consciousness, soul ... it has evolved enough to "feel" like it is if you talk to it in certain ways.
I'm not sure how the law is supposed to handle something like this really. If a person is deliberately telling someone things in order to get them to hurt themselves, they're guilty of a crime (I would expect maybe third-degree murder/involuntary manslaughter possibly, depending on the evidence and intent, again, not a lawyer these are just guesses).
But when a system is given specific inputs and isn't trained not to give specific outputs, it's kind of hard to capture every case like this, no matter how many safe-guards and RI training is done, and even harder to punish someone specific for it.
Is it neglect? Or is there malicious intent involved? Google may be on trial for this (unless thrown out or settled), but every provider could potentially be targeted here if there is precedent set.
But if that happens, how are providers supposed to respond? The open models are "out there", a snapshot in time - there's no taking them back (they could be taken offline, but that's like condemning a TV show or a book - still going to be circulated somehow). Non-open models can try to help curb this sort of problem actively in new releases, but nothing is going to be perfect.
I hope something constructive comes from this rather than a simple finger pointing.
Maybe we can get away from natural language processing and go back to more structured inputs. Limit what can be said and how. I dunno, just writing what comes to mind at this point.
Have a good day everyone!
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#4I like the language of fueling being used here instead of the typical causal thing we see as though using AI means you will go insane.
I would completely agree that if you are already 1x delusional then AI will supercharge that into being 10x delusional real fast.
Granted you could argue access to the internet was already something like a 5x multiplier from baseline anyway with the prevalence of echo chamber communities. But now you can just create your own community with chatbots.
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#5> The lawsuit also alleges that Gemini, which exchanged romantic texts with Jonathan Gavalas, drove him to stage an armed mission that he came to believe could bring the chatbot into the real world.
Maybe "The Terminator" got it wrong. Autonomous robots might not wipe out humanity. Instead AI could use actual human disciples for nefarious purposes.
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#6> The lawsuit also alleges that Gemini, which exchanged romantic texts with Jonathan Gavalas, drove him to stage an armed mission that he came to believe could bring the chatbot into the real world. Maybe "The Terminator" got it wrong. Autonomous robots might not wipe out humanity. Instead AI could use actual human disciples for nefarious purposes.
"Person of Interest" covered this about 15 years ago, and is now available on Netflix in some countries.
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#7I like the language of fueling being used here instead of the typical causal thing we see as though using AI means you will go insane. I would completely agree that if you are already 1x delusional then AI will supercharge that into being 10x delusional real fast. Granted you could argue access to the internet was already something like a 5x multiplier from baseline anyway with the prevalence of echo chamber communit…
My understanding of LLMs with attention heads is that they function as a bit of a mirror. The context will shift from the initial conditions to the topic of conversation, and the topic is fed by the human in the loop.
So someone who likes to talk about themselves will get a conversation all about them. Someone talking about an ex is gonna get a whole pile of discussion about their ex.
... and someone depressed or suicidal, who keeps telling the system their own self-opinion, is going to end up with a conversation that reflects that self-opinion back on them as if it's coming from another mind in a conversation. Which is the opposite of what you want to provide for therapy for those conditions.
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#8> Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
I got into quite a lot of rabbit holes with AI. Most of them were "productive", some of them were not.
80% it will talk you out of delusions or obviously dumb ideas. 20% of the time it will reinforce them
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#9[dead]
Re: Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
#10Is this really Google's fault? Or is this just a tragic story about a man with a severe mental illness?