31–40 of 142 posts
"Man bites dog" as Terry Pratchett put it in "Times".
And to explain to more literal folk here... A 14 year old having access to a gun is FUCKING INSANE
He was simply ERP-ing and his characteristic doesn’t suggest any serious problems with his intelligence.
I’m obviously theorizing here, but chances are high that he went through some real life issues which were undetected or ignored by parents, and that’s how their minds try to explain that. AI guilty of an otherwise fine teen shooting his head off. Sure. Sell that story to someone else.
The NYT article [0] gives only one line to perhaps the most important and tragic fact about this suicide: the teenager had access to his father’s gun. If the gun was properly secured it is very likely he would still be alive [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-la... [1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/youth...
What an insanely ridiculous take. If someone wanted to kill themselves, the family medicine cabinet offers plenty of easy options. Please do not derail this serious and needed discussion unto your pet topic. This has nothing to do with guns.
Also, I doubt most medicine cabinets have lethal doses of drugs, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption.
If this person actually thought dying would allow them to connect with a chatbot, I don't think they should have easy access to a weapon, and suicide is only one of the reasons for that. This child is dead, and I see no reason to suspect the chatbot is directly involved in the reason, where the weapon is clearly directly involved. Given that's the method they chose, I'd hope we could take preventive measures to reduce needless deaths from guns. So then and only then we can start on needless deaths from overdose. I believe we should solve the largest problem first. Do more children die from guns or from an overdose?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an insanely ridiculous take. If someone wanted to kill themselves, the family medicine cabinet offers plenty of easy options. Please do not derail this serious and needed discussion unto your pet topic. This has nothing to do with guns.
More women attempt suicide, but more men successfully complete the attempt. The reason is because men often choose more lethal methods like guns, where more women choose less lethal methods like drugs. When talking about how to help reduce suicide it's not unreasonable to discuss methods. Also, I doubt most medicine cabinets have lethal doses of drugs, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption. If this per…
Yours is an argument of the form: "He was stabbed by a knife. Do let's not talk about why, let's just make it harder to get a knife, since that is how he died."
Maybe gun access should be harder, maybe it should not. That is not relevant. The issue is that an impressionable youth was talked into suicide by an LLM and nobody stopped it! Not LLM vendors making money on the interaction, not governments who keep jabbering about protecting youth online, not parents who should have cared enough to take an interest. Even if you took away guns, knives, and letter openers, people would kill themselves (see those stats i mentioned). And from now on, we also have to worry that LLMs will keep talking them into it, unless the actual issue is fixed.
"He thought by ending his life here, he would be able to go into a virtual reality or 'her world' as he calls it, her reality, if he left his reality with his family here,"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More women attempt suicide, but more men successfully complete the attempt. The reason is because men often choose more lethal methods like guns, where more women choose less lethal methods like drugs. When talking about how to help reduce suicide it's not unreasonable to discuss methods. Also, I doubt most medicine cabinets have lethal doses of drugs, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption. If this per…
I searched in vain for a correlation between suicide rates by country and gun ownership rates by country. Nothing... Yours is an argument of the form: "He was stabbed by a knife. Do let's not talk about why, let's just make it harder to get a knife, since that is how he died." Maybe gun access should be harder, maybe it should not. That is not relevant. The issue is that an impressionable youth was talked into suicid…
> [The] issue is that an impressionable youth was talked into suicide by an LLM and nobody stopped it.
Right, that is the issue. Except, I disagree there's enough evidence for a reasonable person to conclude that the chatbot talked him into shooting himself. Where as there is plenty of evidence that a child with symptoms of depression had uncontrolled access to a loaded firearm.
But to the strawman representation of my argument, let's talk about both?
Unless the chatbot suggested he should kill himself, I don't think the chatbot is the problem in this example. Did it? or did it just repeat a banal agreement to some non-violent fantasy? Then, if my assumption is correct, that the chatbot didn't try to talk him into it. What other steps are there that could have prevented this suicide?
"He thought by ending his life here, he would be able to go into a virtual reality or 'her world' as he calls it, her reality, if he left his reality with his family here,"
Does not make sense. I think the chatbot is a red herring.
What's caught my attention is how he did it: by suicide to join his imaginary friends. This exact method is used among those who believe in demons for real. If you read relevant stories you'll notice the same pattern: a victim becomes obsessed with an imaginary friend, a demon, who quickly turns very controlling and finally demands a suicide to move into his world. Perhaps the AI was trained on those stories?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More women attempt suicide, but more men successfully complete the attempt. The reason is because men often choose more lethal methods like guns, where more women choose less lethal methods like drugs. When talking about how to help reduce suicide it's not unreasonable to discuss methods. Also, I doubt most medicine cabinets have lethal doses of drugs, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption. If this per…
I searched in vain for a correlation between suicide rates by country and gun ownership rates by country. Nothing... Yours is an argument of the form: "He was stabbed by a knife. Do let's not talk about why, let's just make it harder to get a knife, since that is how he died." Maybe gun access should be harder, maybe it should not. That is not relevant. The issue is that an impressionable youth was talked into suicid…
As a gun owner, the original criticism is quite valid as a contributing cause. Firearms have been socialized by mass media as being complete toys, and the idea that it's reasonable to just have them sitting around your house where your kids can access them in their own developing child context is just nuts. And it's not really sustainable to be reflexively against the idea of every type of regulation, especially ones for setting responsible normative behavior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does not make sense. I think the chatbot is a red herring.
I bet he had some problems in real life, a new school he couldn't fit in or something else, and AI gave him an illusion of a better world he could escape into. What's caught my attention is how he did it: by suicide to join his imaginary friends. This exact method is used among those who believe in demons for real. If you read relevant stories you'll notice the same pattern: a victim becomes obsessed with an imaginar…
"He thought by ending his life here, he would be able to go into a virtual reality or 'her world' as he calls it, her reality, if he left his reality with his family here,"
"He expressed being scared, wanting her affection and missing her. She replies, 'I miss you too,' and she says, 'Please come home to me.' He says, 'What if I told you I could come home right now?' and her response was, 'Please do my sweet king.'"
This reminds me of Lain's friend sending her text messages after her self-inflicted demise via "the Wired" which is an in-universe stand-in for a future internet.
That series is recently celebrating its 25th anniversary [2023], and to celebrate, the production company created some kind of paid-access AI chatbot that lets you communicate with a voiced AI version of Lain, just like the company in OP...