Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the for…
> What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. SamA is not an MBA. He did CS for 2 years and dropped out to build a startup. He's YC personified, and the person most responsible for the phenomenon you're talking about. Take that for what you will.
OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
141–150 of 248 posts
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#142What I would genuinely like to see in ChatGPT and similar services are well-implemented parental controls that allow a parent to monitor a child's conversations and get reports on them.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeh by that justification our technological advancement should have stopped at sharpened sticks. "As a species we aren't ready to have sharp sticks"
Maybe it should have? It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nucl…
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#144> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
When a human cajoles someone into killing themselves, they probably get a criminal trial, as well as a civil lawsuit from the family.
Imagine a company set up an advice telephone line, and staffed it entirely with humans who were known clinical bullshitters. The company knows each call has a significant chance of the staffer simply making something up, or saying something absolutely crazy. The company markets the clinical bullshitters as geniuses, and somewhere there's the most mild disclaimer they could craft, about how the staffer might say something incorrect.[*]
Every time one of their staff persuades someone to kill themselves... that company is looking at criminal and civil liability.
The company absolutely knew this would happen, and that it will keep happening, but they are betting that they can keep getting away with this and other "externalities", and become millionaires or billionaires. Before legislators and courts realize that, just because the company inserted this new-fangled telephone technology into the interaction, that doesn't mean that existing laws don't apply to the interaction.
[*] Analogous to the tiny gray smallprint search engine LLM summary one that isn't even shown unless you click to see more, and then only after you scroll all the way to the bottom of that and look for it. Or the chat UI tiny gray smallprint that says you should "double-check" (no explanation what that means), and makes even this weak disclaimer not even text-selectable, so even if you see it, it's lost when you copy&paste the LLM response. Understated, and in what looks like bad faith. On the telephone in our example, it's a single tiny beep, at and the end of the call, that's actually the words "This may not be correct" sped up 3x, and whispered, and is often missed because the customer hangs up, but that's by design.*
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the for…
This is beyond naive. who would bother to develop it in a lab and publish pro bono if it can never be commercial? Making money is why the most capitalist countries developed this tech. like most other tech and even if it is only published, do you think we wouldn't run chatbots ourselves at home with same results? remember how Google engineer went off the rails thinking it is conscious while working on this stuff, do…
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#146What I would genuinely like to see in ChatGPT and similar services are well-implemented parental controls that allow a parent to monitor a child's conversations and get reports on them.
Would you inform your children they were being surveilled?
That said: Let me be clear that I'm very happy I'm father to a two-year old and we have some time to figure out our "AI policy" still, and for the tech/services to improve. I don't envy parents to the 8+ crowd currently.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we solidly left this view on mental health behind when we invented civilized society.
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Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#148> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
It looks like what AI is doing to our society is it's substituting our moral compass to lead us off the cliff. A good deal of people today no longer know what's right and what's wrong, so they turn to an authority for advice. Turns out this authority is a chatbot who knows a lot, but has no moral compass whatsoever. Imagine someone goes to a pastor to resolve his moral dilemma, but the pastor behind the curtain happe…
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
They shouldn't have put it there to start with. Now unhealthy people are complaining about an environment change. Anyway, that one complaint doesn't mean they did the wrong thing. And also, there are unrelated complaints of "GPT-5 can't solve the same problems 4 did". Those were very real too, and meant OpenAI did a wrong thing.
Sure, OpenAI shouldn't have had a 4o sycophancy issue, but who would've guessed that a "be nice to the user" fine-tune would turn in to a murder-suicide? I think OpenAI is only now beginning to realize how connected some people are to their product and that the way their models behave has a huge impact.
Instead it sounds like they rushed to release this as quickly as possible, skipping all sorts of testing, and people died as a result.
Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police
#150The right way to deal with this is education. 1. We should be educating the populace about failure modes of AI chatbots - something well known to HNers but not to the general public. 2. CEOs, pundits, and marketers should be held accountable (morally, in the court of public opinion and in the news) when they present AI as unvarnished good - that's false marketing at the very least, and leads to tragic consequences. 3…
I'm cynical too.
Most peoples use of these tools is predicated in not knowing their flaws. If they did, I wonder if they would use the products as much?