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

nytimes.com

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

#381

Post by mothballed »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #374
behringer wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh won't somebody please think of the children?!

So do we just trot out the same tired lines every time and never think of the social fallout of our actions?

Of course not, we sue the shit out of the richest guy we can find in the chain of events, give most of it to our lawyer, then go on to ignore the weakening of the family unit and all the other deep-seated challenges kids face growing up and instead focus superficially on chatbots which at best are the spec on the tip of the iceberg.

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

#382

Post by footy »

behringer wrote: post #340
podgietaru wrote: post #63

I have looked suicide in the eyes before. And reading the case file for this is absolutely horrific. He wanted help. He was heading in the direction of help, and he was stopped from getting it. He wanted his parents to find out about his plan. I know this feeling. It is the clawing feeling of knowing that you want to live, despite feeling like you want to die. We are living in such a horrific moment. We need these th…

We don't need AI legislated and we don't need it punished. The child was offered multiple times to call a hotline or seek help. The last thing we need is for AI to be neutered by government ineptness.

Have you read the chat logs?

Just asking because ChatGPT specifically encouraged this kid not to seek help.

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

#383

Post by HSO »

Here we go again.

Most charitable interpretation of this kind of articles now flooding legacy media is boomer tech incompetence/incomprehension mixed with everything after my golden teen/twen years was decline (misattributing their own physical decline and increasing little pains and nags to the wider world)

Most realistic imo is that this is a rehash of internet panic when legacy publicists realized their lunch was going to be eaten. Or social media panic when they realized non-establishment candidates would win. Etc.

Most cynical take is that this is a play for control and injection of further censorship.

In other words: this article is pure trash, playing (or preying) on gullible people´s emotions about a tragic event

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

#384

Post by itvision »

fredoliveira wrote: post #377
charcircuit wrote: post #171

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…

> he could have stopped at any time. Obviously, clearly untrue. You go ahead and try stopping a behavior that reinforces your beliefs, especially when you're in an altered mental state.

If a stupid chatbot reinforces something you hold dear, maybe you need the help of a professional psychiatrist. And the kid never did.

But yeah, let's paint ChatGPT responsible. It's always corporations, not whatever shit he had in his life, including and not limited to his genes.

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

#385

Post by ipython »

mothballed wrote: post #350
podgietaru wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Is this deliberately obtuse? Books are not granted freedom of speech, authors are. Their method is books. This is like saying sound waves are not granted freedom of speech. Unless you're suggesting there's a man sat behind every ChatGPT chat your analogy is nonsense.

Yes I am saying there is a man "sat" as it were behind every ChatGPT chat. The authors of ChatGPT basically made something closer to a turing-complete "choose-your-own adventure" book. They ensured you could choose an adventure where the reader can choose a suicide roleplay adventure, but it is up to the reader whether they want to flip to that page. If they want to flip to the page that says "suicide" then it will t…

It takes intent and effort to publish or speak. That’s not present here. None of the authors who have “contributed” to the training data of any ai bot have consented to such.

In addition, the exact method at work here - model alignment - is something that model providers specifically train models for. The raw pre training data is only the first step and doesn’t on its own produce a usable model.

So in effect the “choice” on how to respond to queries about suicide is as much influenced by OpenAIs decisions as it is by its original training data.

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

#387

Post by fzeindl »

lionkor wrote: post #371
fzeindl wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no comparison to therapists. Because a therapist would NEVER do that unless wanting to cause harm. Some therapists ultimately might. It occurs that therapists were stripped of their licenses for leading abusive sects: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Feeling_Therapy

That's an edge case, this case is ChatGPT working as intended .

Exactly. That might be something interesting to think about. Humans make mistakes. LLMs make mistakes.

Yet for humans we have built a society which prevents these mistakes except in edge cases.

Would humans make these mistakes as often as LLMs if there would be no consequences?

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

#388

Post by staticman2 »

sumeno wrote: post #20

This is a clear example of why the people claiming that using a chatbot for therapy is better than no therapy are... I'll be extremely generous and say misguided. This kid wanted his parents to know he was thinking about this and the chatbot talked him out of it.

There's no indication the kid asked ChatGPT to act as a therapist. Unless people are claiming any prompt is better than no therapy I don't think your framing is fair.

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

#389

Post by [deleted] »

podgietaru wrote: post #54

If I google something about suicide, I get an immediate notification telling me that life is worth living, and giving me information about my local suicide prevention hotline. If I ask certain AI models about controversial topics, it'll stop responding. AI models can easily detect topics, and it could have easily responded with generic advice about contacting people close to them, or ringing one of these hotlines. Th…

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by spacechild1 »

itvision wrote: post #379
podgietaru wrote: post #63

I have looked suicide in the eyes before. And reading the case file for this is absolutely horrific. He wanted help. He was heading in the direction of help, and he was stopped from getting it. He wanted his parents to find out about his plan. I know this feeling. It is the clawing feeling of knowing that you want to live, despite feeling like you want to die. We are living in such a horrific moment. We need these th…

> We are living in such a horrific moment. We need these things to be legislated. Punished. We need to stop treating them as magic. They had the tools to prevent this. They had the tools to stop the conversation. To steer the user into helpful avenues. No, no, no and no. ChatGPT wasn't the source of his desire to end his life, nor was it the means to do it. It was a "person" to talk to, since he had no such real peop…

> it's just ChatGPT.

Where did they claim that?

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