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ChatGPT medical advice brought man 'to brink of death', lawsuit alleges

bbc.com

21–24 of 24 posts

Re: ChatGPT medical advice brought man 'to brink of death', lawsuit alleges

#21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this situation says more about rampant/unchecked/unregulated businesses and the american legal system/beliefs around regulation than anything. mcdonald’s coffee “warning: contents may be hot” comes to mind as a previous example. fast food businesses were competing to serve the hottest coffee and one of them ended up scalding a woman so badly they were forced to put warnings on their coffee cups. replace coffee being…

Nobody would expect their coffee to be almost boiling, everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time. Even Steve Jobs died early because he took vibes-based advice instead of just listening to doctors. You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.

> everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time.

oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions

with a tiny disclaimer in greyed out text at the bottom of the ui that says they sometimes get things wrong.

> You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.

firstly, i’m not snarking about capitalism. i’m snarking about american companies.

second. yes. but when someone is less able to look after themselves there is a question to answer about the influence something like an LLM is having on them.

ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models. and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.

dark pattern addictive design causing real world harms, being dismissed and waved off, yet again from american companies.

Re: ChatGPT medical advice brought man 'to brink of death', lawsuit alleges

#22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody would expect their coffee to be almost boiling, everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time. Even Steve Jobs died early because he took vibes-based advice instead of just listening to doctors. You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.

> everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time. oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions with a tiny disclaimer in greyed out text at the bottom of the ui that says they sometimes get things wrong. > You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of…

> oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions

No, they're being advertised as useful tools. Obviously the tool salesmen are gonna inflate their capabilities, but in the past few years I've never heard ANYONE important make the claim that they're always correct. I've seen that used as an attack pretty often though.

> ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models.

Yes but it's not like random otherwise healthy people do this which seems to be what you're implying. There are clearly other risk factors at play here and it's not obvious how much the AI is contributing. Psychosis isn't new and AI hasn't moved the needle much.

> and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.

Or... people just happen to like it when the model speaks in a friendly voice and that desire is impossible to separate out when you're figuring out if an LLM's response is good.

Don't try and put this on American companies when you can just go to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and see pretty plainly that lots of people insist of syncophancy. Obviously this isn't good or healthy, but it's not wrong or nefarious. It's certainly not an America-only phenomenon.

Re: ChatGPT medical advice brought man 'to brink of death', lawsuit alleges

#23
The comments here are ridiculous. Do you know how much ChatGPT has helped families, esp. those without access to the top medical doctors and resources around the world? My own experience with it so far have been nothing but positive. It beat all the doctors in various hospitals that we have consulted so far on breadth and depth and the best thing is you can keep asking follow-up questions on anything and it gives you all the details you need without being rushed.

The fact that it is not 100% reliable shouldn't be basis for restrictions. Even top trained doctors are far from 100% reliable either.

Re: ChatGPT medical advice brought man 'to brink of death', lawsuit alleges

#24

I really hope the lawsuit does not end in OpenAI tightening the “safety” and “security” of their models into oblivion. I hope they understand that a lobotomized model is as good as my Casio watch. I want my models to give it to me straight without patronizing me. I’m an adult and I take responsibility for my own actions.

That's the issue here tho. You do not own the model; they do. Ergo it is their advice and so they can be held accountable fo it.

I don’t think this is true if a disclaimer is provided. Most investment advice videos on YouTube make this very clear, but it doesn’t stop them from sharing advice. I suppose there is some precedent for this in the American justice system.
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