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OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

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Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#171

Post by const_cast »

nickthegreek wrote: post #106
Handy-Man wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You dont have to take sides on the political seesaw to understand that mainstream media is becoming more irrelevant to large sects of society. You might have a take that its a bad or good thing.. but it is true. There is no longer a vast mono-culture, and with it's loss, a fractured sense of reality amongst the inhabitants.

Lack of mainstream media doesn't mean the death of monoculture - were seeing a huge resurgence in populist messaging over the past 10 years. Its aided by the distributed nature of the internet.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#172

Post by cm2012 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #117
bilbo0s wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "ment…

> I know that no one wants to hear this, but ChatGPT should probably be listening for people in crisis and, well, maybe not calling the cops, but maybe if there is a crisis line in their jurisdiction? A suicide hotline or something? Doesn't necessarily even need to call (particular in case of false positives) but there absolutely should be detection and a cutoff switch, where the chatbots just refuse to continue the…

This may reduce liability but if your answer to someone in crisis is "dont talk to me, call the official number", that will be considered a very negative user experience.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#173

Post by const_cast »

VonGuard wrote: post #33
kbelder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The fact that the crimes done by a mentally ill person are going to be used as a justification for surveillance on the wider population of users is a strong ethical reason to advocate for more security.

Yeah, it'd be terrible if all our emails, DNS queries, purchase histories, messages, Facebook posts, Google searches, in store purchase, driving and GPS info were being tracked, cataloged, and sold to anyone who wants it! Why, people would never stand for such surveillance! Anyone with half a brain complaining about hypothetical future privacy violations on some random platform just makes me spit milk out my nose. Wh…

Things suck therefore it doesn't matter if things suck even more.

Just not a very good argument.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#174

Post by throwup238 »

idle_zealot wrote: post #120
saubeidl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen Almost. Just take it like an inch further. What's really killing us is capitalism . MBAs and Salesmen are just the personification.

I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…

You don’t need to jump to political extremes and it doesn’t help when discussing capitalism as the successor to mercantilism rather than its own political system. The answer to the problem of capitalism isn’t necessarily communism or socialism or a wholesale change of political system but lots of small solutions like well regulated markets with strong labor laws and trust busting, a more robust safety net, increased anticorruption and white collar crime enforcement, better consumer protection, and so on. Ones that can be mostly implemented regardless of the political system, given the political will.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#175

Post by [deleted] »

barbazoo wrote: post #3

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#176

Post by const_cast »

ericmcer wrote: post #166
const_cast wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this thing is just like this other thing because they can both be bad, therefore we should do nothing. Its the classic low-brow reasoning technique. It almost makes sense, if you squint and don't think about it much. No, there's levels of bad and we have no problem making some bad stuff off limits. I can't build nuclear weapons, after all.

Sharp stick is a better analogy than a nuke for having access to an AI chatbot. A crazy person could use it to hurt themselves or maybe a couple other people. You really think having access to ChatGPT is as dangerous as giving everyone a nuclear weapon?

Of course I don't, I'm directly refuting the "everything is everything else" style of reasoning.

But AI, as a piece of software available to everyone, is certainly more dangerous than a sharp stick.

If I went out and produced, say, 200,000 sharp sticks and started hanging them out like candy, guess what - id get the authorities attention.

Everything is a function of scale. If we ignore scale than stubbing your toe is genocide, stealing a penny is grand theft auto, and running a mile is time travel.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#177

Post by fwip »

johnfn wrote: post #28

Didn't we have a conversation a few days ago where a kid committed suicide while documenting it on ChatGPT and the clear consensus was that if OpenAI had been scanning user's conversations and reporting them to the police, this could have been averted, and this was a huge issue? But now when they go and do it, everyone says this is completely unacceptable? What exactly is OpenAI supposed to do, then?

I think this might be an instance of the Goomba fallacy: https://englishinprogress.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ima...

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#178

Post by ChrisArchitect »

[dupe]

This story didn't just break.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088651

WSJ source last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45059030

OpenAI's response from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45050635

Related:

In Search of AI Psychosis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45027072

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#179

Post by Kuinox »

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #168
Kuinox wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, ou can think about how french fries taste but unless you can feel the taste you won't be repulsed if someone suggested making salad out of your left over french fries. Deep fried potato salad is a thing and humans didnt waited LLMs to invent it.

[Yuk,] a thing where?

Just search it: https://www.theenglishkitchen.co/2015/07/fried-potato-salad.... https://www.food.com/recipe/southern-fried-potato-salad-2134...

And simply french fries salad: https://tinaschic.com/2015/02/french-fry-salad/

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#180

Post by ben_w »

dingnuts wrote: post #95
ben_w wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the form of papers and Python projects with model weights with clear descriptions of what they're capable of, like a responsible scientific endeavor, then we'd not be seeing the problems we are, even with public access. I'm now thinking of all of the times people here of sarcastically stated "OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too dangerous to release"*, as if danger onl…

they meant that to be interpreted as a statement of how good GPT-2 is but the real problem is how they've marketed everything that came after to people who can't know better it's EXACTLY the same situation as Musk selling "Full Self Driving" and then playing dumb when people go to sleep behind the wheel of their Tesla These rich men should be in prison for this kind of false advertising

> they meant that to be interpreted as a statement of how good GPT-2 is

Every previous time someone says something like this, I've looked at the original blog post again just to make sure I didn't miss something.

OpenAI's own words for GPT-2 never read like a boast to me. Caution, not a boast.

News may have bigged it up, but news does that for everything.

I mean just compare it to the GPT-5 release: they're not shy or subtle when they actually want to boast.

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