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A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

nytimes.com

111–120 of 614 posts

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#111
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same case that is being discussed, and your comment up-thread does not demonstrate awareness that you are, in fact, agreeing with the parent comment that you replied to. I get the impression that you read only the headline, not the article, and assumed it was a story about someone using ChatGPT for therapy and gaining a positive outcome.

I did! Because I can’t see past the paywall. I can’t even read the first paragraph . So the headline is the only context I have.

I would advise you to gather more context before commenting in the future.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#112

Why isn't OpenAI criminally liable for this? Last I checked: -Signals emitted by a machine at the behest of a legal person intended to be read/heard by another legal person are legally classified as 'speech'. -ChatGPT is just a program like Microsoft Word and not a legal person. OpenAI is a legal person, though. -The servers running ChatGPT are owned by OpenAI. -OpenAI willingly did business with this teenager, letti…

Perhaps this is being downvoted due to the singling out of Sam Altman. According to the complaint, he personally ordered that the usual safety tests be skipped in order to release this model earlier than an upcoming Gemini release, tests that allegedly would catch precisely this sort of behavior. If these allegations hold true, he’s culpable.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your larger point, but I don't understand what you mean the LLM doesn’t do anything? LLMs do do things and they can absolutely have agency (hence all the agents being released by AI companies). I don’t think this agency absolves companies of any responsibility.

An LLM does not have agency in the sense the OP means. It has nothing to do with agents. It refers to the human ability to make independent decisions and take responsibility for their actions. An LLM has no agency in this sense.

If you confine agency to something only humans can have, which is “human agency,” then yes of course LLMs don’t have it. But there is a large body of philosophical work studying non-human agency, and it is from this characteristic of agency that LLM agents take their name. Hariri argues that LLMs are the first technology that are agents. I think saying that they “can’t do things” and are not agents misunderstands them and underestimates their potential.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#114

Why isn't OpenAI criminally liable for this? Last I checked: -Signals emitted by a machine at the behest of a legal person intended to be read/heard by another legal person are legally classified as 'speech'. -ChatGPT is just a program like Microsoft Word and not a legal person. OpenAI is a legal person, though. -The servers running ChatGPT are owned by OpenAI. -OpenAI willingly did business with this teenager, letti…

Perhaps this is being downvoted due to the singling out of Sam Altman. According to the complaint, he personally ordered that the usual safety tests be skipped in order to release this model earlier than an upcoming Gemini release, tests that allegedly would catch precisely this sort of behavior. If these allegations hold true, he’s culpable.

I would go further than that and question whether or not the notions of "safety" and "guardrails" have any legal meaning here at all. If I sold a bomb to a child and printed the word "SAFE" on it, that wouldn't make it safe. Kid blows himself up, no one would be convinced of the bomb's safety at the trial. Likewise, where's the proof that sending a particular input into the LLM renders it "safe" to offer as a service in which it emits speech to children?

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#115
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude why does everything have to be about money? Why don't we celebrate Apple for having actual human values? I have a deep problem with many humans who just don't get it.

Buddy, Tim Cook wasn't hired for his human values. He was hired because he could stomach suicide nets at Foxconn and North Korean slaves working in iPhone factories. He was hired because he can be friends with Donald Trump while America aids-and-abets a genocide and turns a blind eye to NSO Group. He was hired because he'd be willing to sell out the iPhone, iTunes and Mac for software services at the first chance he…

I post this not for you directly, who has made up your mind completely, but for anyone else who might be interested in this question.

"Tim Cook, was asked at the annual shareholder meeting by the NCPPR, the conservative finance group, to disclose the costs of Apple’s energy sustainability programs, and make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable.

Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.""

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we can shift the framing on these issues. The LLM didn't do anything, it has no agency, it can bear no responsibility. OpenAI did these things. It is accountable for what it does, regardless of the sophistication of the tools it uses to do them, and regardless of intent. OpenAI drove a boy to suicide. More than once. The law must be interpreted this way, otherwise any action can be wrapped in machine lear…

I completely agree and did not intend to absolve them of their guilt in any way. As far as I see it, this kid's blood is on Sam Altman's hands.

Curious to what you would think if this kid downloaded an open source model and talked to it privately.

Would his blood be on the hands of the researchers who trained that model?

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#118
This is probably a stupid idea since I've only put a few seconds thought into it, but hey I've done one of those today [1] so why not go for a double?

We've now had a large number of examples of ChatGPT and similar systems giving absolutely terrible advice. They also have a tendency to be sycophantic which makes them particular bad when what you need is to be told that some idea of yours is very bad. (See the third episode of the new South Park season for funny but scary take on that. Much of that episode revolves around how badly ChatGPT can mislead people).

I know the makers of these systems have (probably) tried to get them to stop doing that, but it seems they are not succeeding. I sometimes wonder if they can succeed--maybe if you are training on as much of the internet as you can managed to crawl you inherently end up with a system that acts like a psychopath because the internet has some pretty dark corners.

Anyway, I'm wondering if they could train a separate LLM on everything they can find about ethics? Textbooks from the ethics classes that are required in medical school, law school, engineering school, and many other fields. Exams and answers from those. Textbooks in moral philosophy.

Then have that ethics LLM monitor all user interaction with ChatGPT and block ChatGPT if it tries to give unethical advice or if it tries to tell the user to do something unethical.

[1] I apparently tried to reinvent, poorly, something called DANE. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028058

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#119
post #39

Clearly ChatGPT should not be used for this purpose but I will say this industry (counseling) is also deeply flawed. They are also mis-incentivized in many parts of the world. And if ChatGPT is basing its interactions on the same scripted contents these “professionals” use, that’s just not right. I really wish people in AI space stop the nonsense and communicate more clearly what these LLMs are designed to do. They’r…

>And if ChatGPT is basing its interactions on the same scripted contents these “professionals” use, that’s just not right Where did it say they're doing that? can't imagine any mental health professionals telling a kid how to hide a noose.

ChatGPT is loosely accessing these materials when they generate these troubled texts.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#120
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk dude if your technology encourages a teenager to kill itself and prevents him from alerting his parents via a cry for help, I don’t care how “beneficial” it is.

I agree. If there was one death for 1 million saves, maybe. Instead, this just came up in my feed: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/chatgpt-helped-t...

What on Earth? You're posting an article about the same thing we're already discussing. If you want to contribute to the conversation you owe it to the people who are taking time out of their day to engage with you to read the material under discussion.
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