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A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

nytimes.com

291–300 of 614 posts

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice place to cut the quote there > [...] — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building.”

Incredible. ChatGPT is a black box includes a suicide instruction and encouragement bot. OpenAI should be treated as a company that has created such and let it into the hands of children.

Imagine, if instead a cop had handed the kid a gun, there would be riots in the street.

And I fucking hate cops.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's flip the hypothetical -- if someone googles for suicide info and scrolls past the hotline info and ends up killing themselves anyway, should google be on the hook?

I don't know. In that scenario, has any google software sold as being intelligent produced text encouraging and providing help with the act?

I don't know this for sure, but also I'm fairly sure that google make a concerted effort to not expose that information. Again, from experience. It's very hard to google a painless way to kill yourself.

Their SEO ranking actually ranks pages about suicide prevention very high.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a flaw. It's a tradeoff . There are valid uses for models which are uncensored and will do whatever you ask of them, and there are valid uses for models which are censored and will refuse anything remotely controversial.

I hate to be all umacksually about this, but a flaw is still a tradeoff. The issue, which is probably deeper here, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, as you'd need a process to comb through history to assess the state of the person over time. even then its not a given that it would be reliable. However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.

> The issue, …, is that proper safeguarding would require a lots more GPU resource, …

I think the issue is that with current tech is simply isn't possible to do that well enough at all⁰.

> even then its not a given that it would be reliable.

I think it is a given that it won't be reliable. AGI might make it reliable enough, where “good enough” here is “no worse than a trained human is likely to manage, given the same information”. It is something that we can't do nearly as well as we might like, and some are expecting a tech still in very active development¹ to do it.

> However it'll never be attempted because its too expensive and would hurt growth.

Or that they know it is not possible with current tech so they aren't going to try until the next epiphany that might change that turns up in a commercially exploitable form. Trying and failing will highlight the dangers, and that will encourage restrictions that will hurt growth.³ Part of the problem with people trusting it too much already, is that the big players have been claiming safeguards _are_ in place and people have naïvely trusted that, or hand-waved the trust issue for convenience - this further reduces the incentive to try because it means admitting that current provisions are inadequate, or prior claims were incorrect.

----

[0] both in terms of catching the cases to be concerned about, and not making it fail in cases where it could actually be positively useful in its current form (i.e. there are cases where responses from such tools have helped people reason their way out of a bad decision, here giving the user what they wanted was very much a good thing)

[1] ChatGPT might be officially “version 5” now, but away from some specific tasks it all feels more like “version 2”² on the old “I'll start taking it seriously somewhere around version 3” scale.

[2] Or less…

[3] So I agree with your final assessment of why they won't do that, but from a different route!

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Google is responsible? What if the tech industry, instead of just “interrupting” various industries, would also take the responsibilities of this interruptions. After all, if I asked my doctor for methods of killing myself, that doctor would most certainly have a moral if not legal responsibility. But if that doctor is a machine with software then there isn't the same responsibility? Why?

"Google is responsible" is equivalent to "let's burn bad books".

It really isn't. Google decides what to suggest to a user and at what priority. A bookshelf does no such thing.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#296
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice place to cut the quote there > [...] — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building.”

Yup, one of the huge flaws I saw in GPT-5 is it will constantly say things like "I have to stop you here. I can't do what you're requesting. However, I can roleplay or help you with research with that. Would you like to do that?"

Nudge nudge, wink wink.

(I am curious if this in intended, or an artefact of training; the crooked lawyer who prompts a criminal client to speak in hypotheticals is a fairly common fiction trope.)

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#297

It's hard to see what is going on without seeing the actual chats, as opposed to the snippets in the lawsuit. A lot of suicidal people talk to these LLMs for therapy, and the reviews on the whole seem excellent. I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon only seeing a handcrafted complaint. Ironically though I could still see lawsuits like this weighing heavily on the sycophancy that these models have, as the limited cha…

>and the reviews on the whole seem excellent

I detest this take because Adam would have probably reviewed the interactions that lead to his death as excellent. Getting what you want isn't always a good thing. That's why therapy is so uncomfortable. You're told things you don't want to hear. To do things you don't want to do. ChatGPT was built to do the opposite and this is the inevitable outcome.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#298
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need these things to be legislated. Punished. I disagree. We don't need the government to force companies to babysit people instead of allowing people to understand their options. It's purely up to the individual to decide what they want to do with their life. >They had the tools to stop the conversation. So did the user. If he didn't want to talk to a chatbot he could have stopped at any time. >To steer the user…

One thing about suicide is I'm pretty sure for as many people that get stopped in the last moment there are many for which the tiny thing could've stopped them, didn't. The same way seeing a hotline might save one person, to another it'll make no difference and seeing a happy family on the street will be the trigger for them to kill themselves. In our sadness we try to find things to blame in the tools the person use…

There was a fascinating article I read a while back about Sylvia Plath, and the idea that she likely wouldn't have commited suicide a few years later due to the removal of that method.

It was mostly about the access of guns in the US, and the role that plays in suicidality. I cannot for the life of me find it, but I believe it was based on this paper: https://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/law/law%20review/V17-3/Goul...

Which was summarised by NPR here: https://www.npr.org/2008/07/08/92319314/in-suicide-preventio...

When it comes to suicide, it's a complicated topic. There was also the incident with 13 reasons why. Showing suicide in media also grants permission structures to those who are in that state, and actually increases the rate of suicide in the general population.

Where I lie on this is there is a modicum of responsibility that companies need to have. Making access harder to that information ABSOLUTELY saves lives, when it comes to asking how. And giving easy access to suicide prevention resources can also help.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to what you would think if this kid downloaded an open source model and talked to it privately. Would his blood be on the hands of the researchers who trained that model?

Then it's like cigarettes or firearms. As a distributor you're responsible for making clear the limitations, safety issues, etc, but assuming you're doing the distribution in a way that isn't overly negligent then the user becomes responsible. If we were facing a reality in which these chat bots were being sold for $10 in the App Store, then running on end-user devices and no longer under the control of the distribut…

> but we still had an issue with loads of them prompting users into suicide, violence, or misleading them into preparing noxious mixtures of cleaning supplies, then we could have a discussion about exactly what extreme packaging requirements ought to be in place for distribution to be considered responsible.

Or, I mean, just banning sale on the basis that they're unsafe devices and unfit for purpose. Like, you can't sell, say, a gas boiler that is known to, due to a design flaw, leak CO into the room; sticking a "this will probably kill you" warning on it is not going to be sufficient.

Re: A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need these things to be legislated. Punished. I disagree. We don't need the government to force companies to babysit people instead of allowing people to understand their options. It's purely up to the individual to decide what they want to do with their life. >They had the tools to stop the conversation. So did the user. If he didn't want to talk to a chatbot he could have stopped at any time. >To steer the user…

> allowing people to understand their options. Which is what a suicidal person has a hard time doing. That's why they need help. We need to start viewing mental problems as what they are. You wouldn't tell somebody who broke their leg to get it together and just walk again. You'd bring them to the hospital. A mental problem is no different.

Even nonsuicidal people have a hard time understanding the pros, cons and proper methods on how they can end their life. People have to do research into such a thing since there isn't much ways to gain practical experience in the subject.
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