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Is this really Google's fault? Or is this just a tragic story about a man with a severe mental illness?
Mental health is guided by its surroundings and experiences.
If someone with existing or non-existing mental health issues was found to be coerced by somebody to do wrong things, I think we'd place some of the blame on that person.
Is this really Google's fault? Or is this just a tragic story about a man with a severe mental illness?
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No they don't, if we're going to start saying that we can't use any technology. If someone is mentally ill to the point where they are on the verge of suicide nothing is safe. If they're going to curtail LLMs there'd need to be some actual evidence and even then it would be hard to justify winding them back given the incredible upsides LLMs offer. It'd probably end up like cars where there is a certain number of deat…
If cars were invented today they probably wouldn't be allowed. They get a pass because they existed before and so we ignore the harm they do
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It's the gun control debate in a different outfit. I don't know if Google is doing _enough_, that can be debated. But if someone is repeatedly ignoring warnings (as the article claims) then maybe we should blame the person performing the act. Even if we perfectly sanitized every public AI provider, people could just use local AI.
It's absolutely not the gun control debate in a different outfit. The difference is in how abuse of the given system affects others. This AI affected this person and his actions affected himself. Nothing about the AI enhanced his ability to hurt others. Guns enhance the ability of mentally unstable people to hurt others with ruthless efficiency. That's the real gun debate -- whether they should be so easy to get give…
That's why I don't buy the "an LLM is just a tool, like a gun or a knife" argument. Tools don't talk back, An LLM as gone beyond being "just a tool"
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Is that different to the number of people who have that going on in their life even without AI though? If it's 0.01% outside of AI, and 0.07% of AI users, then either AI attracts people with those conditions or AI increases the likelihood of having them. That's worth studying. It's also possible that 0.1% of people have them and AI is actually reducing the number of cases...
For the US it's estimated to be about 23% of the population that have a mental illness, and WHO says 12-15% globally or about 1 in 8 people. About 14% of the global population experience suicidal ideation at some point in time. That rate increases for adolescents and young adults, up to 22%. I'd be interested in such a study, but OTOH mental illness conditions being present in nearly a quarter of the world, I'm surpr…
There was a recent study about 99% of people have an abnormal shoulder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064944 . We are all unique in our own way, but labeling everyone as ill does not seem productive.
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> That is 100% unattested. We don't know the context of the interaction. the fact that he killed himself would suggest he did not believe it was a fun little roleplay session > were too dangerous to allow and must be banned. is anyone here saying ai should be banned? im not. > your ill-founded priors "encouraging suicide is bad" is not an ill-founded prior.
> the fact that he killed himself would suggest he did not believe it was a fun little roleplay session I'm not sure that's true. I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if it suggested the opposite, it seems possibly even likely that someone who is suicidal is much, much more likely to seek out fantasies that would make their suicide into something more like this person may have.
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Doesn't google have the capability to have multiple warnings and yet still ignores them?
Google has legal personhood, but as a corporation its ethical responsibilities are much looser than those of an individual, and it's extremely hard to win a criminal case against a corporation even when its agents and representatives act in ways that would be criminal if they happened in a non-corporate context. The law - in practice - is heavily weighted towards giving corporations a pass for criminal behaviour. If…
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Wow, and Google's response to this was "unfortunately AI models are not perfect" That's a bit worse than 'imperfect'
I would say it is greatly worse. AI prompts are designed to simulate empathy as a social engineering tactic. "I understand", "I hear you", "I feel what you are say" ... it is quite sickening. Every one that I used has this type of pseudo feedback. I also find irony that AI must be designed with simulated empathy, to seem intelligent, while at the same time so many people in power and with money are saying empathy is…
But this much is like debating "microevolution" with a YEC and trying to get them to understand the macro consequences. If you've never had the pleasure, consider yourself blessed. It's the debating equivalent of nails-on-chalkboard.
Anyway, in this case a lot of people are deeply committed to not accepting the consequences of affect-processing. Which - you know - I'd just chalk it up to religious differences and agree to disagree. But now it seems like there's profound safety implications due to this denial.
Not sure what to do with that yet.
So far it seems obvious that you need to be prepared to at least reason about affect. Otherwise it becomes rather difficult to deal with the potential failure modes.
All companies in this space already go above and beyond. They offer services with much greater utility than the internet and much lower harm. Safety work shouldn't count as transformation otherwise a perverse incentive is created where "unsafe LLM" are legally immune and safe ones are illegal.
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For the US it's estimated to be about 23% of the population that have a mental illness, and WHO says 12-15% globally or about 1 in 8 people. About 14% of the global population experience suicidal ideation at some point in time. That rate increases for adolescents and young adults, up to 22%. I'd be interested in such a study, but OTOH mental illness conditions being present in nearly a quarter of the world, I'm surpr…
If the estimate is 1/5 people are mentally ill, the definition needs some readjustment. That is such an inclusive number that it must be counting otherwise fine people who....like to count their tic tacs so get labelled as slightly OCD. Had a bummer of a day, so I am prone to depression? There was a recent study about 99% of people have an abnormal shoulder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064944 . We are all…
An abnormality that doesn't cause functional impairment, like that link, is different from a mental illness that does. I'd agree with you, if something is that prevalent then it ceases to be a "disorder" and is simply just pathologizing being human.
But, the 23% statistic refers to people that meet that diagnostic criteria of clinically significant distress or impairment.
I'll acknowledge that diagnostic creep may be a real issue, but just because a condition is common doesn't mean it's not an illness that causes impairment in daily life. 50% of adults have have high blood pressure, but we don't change our meaning of "healthy" to include those with high blood pressure because if left unchecked it can have serious outcomes.
The high numbers might not suggest the definition is broken, but rather that our modern environment is particularly taxing on human psychology