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.
A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in
111–120 of 614 posts
Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in
#112Why 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…
Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in
#113Earlier 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.
Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in
#114Why 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
#115Earlier 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…
"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
#116Earlier 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.
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
#117We cannot control everything but that no one even gives a thought as to how the parents were acting seems strange to me. Maybe readers here see too much of themselves in the parents. If so, I worry for your children.
Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in
#118We'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
#119Clearly 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.
Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in
#120Earlier 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...