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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

#391

Post by kcatskcolbdi »

stavros wrote: post #229
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…

> When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing.

People are not kogs in a machine. You cannot simply make enough rules, enough legislation, and magically they will act the way you want them to. Humans deserve autonomy, and that autonomy includes making poor decisions around their own body/existence.

Chatgpt didn't induce suicidality into this individual. It provided resources they could seek for help. People advocating for higher guardrails are simply using this as a Trojan horse to inject more spying, construct the usefulness of the tool, and make a worse experience for everyone.

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

#392

Post by rpdillon »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #181
holbrad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“we just have to accept that these systems will occasionally kill children” I think this a generally a good mindset to have. I just see the hyper obsessive "safety" culture corrupting things. We as a society are so so afraid of any risk that we're paralysing ourselves.

That sounds a lot like the people who gloss over school shootings because they want to be able to play with guns.

Unpopular, but backed by numbers: school shootings are predominantly media hype.

There are a total of 50,000 gun deaths in the United States each year. Half of those are suicide. The total number of fatalities from all school shootings in the US since 1990 is 536, with roughly 1100 injuries over the same period.

School shootings are very disturbing, but they are also flashy and attract media coverage, and so they are overblown, especially relative to other gun deaths. But I think human psychology leads people to see higher risk in situations where they feel like they have no control. The idea of sending your kid off to school and having them get killed evokes sort of the same helpless feeling as the feeling around a plane crashing when you're a passenger. But when it's inner city gang violence, or a depressed man killing himself in his garage, we don't seem to care as much.

This also plays into the narrative around police shootings. There are about 1100 people killed by cops every year in the United States, and that number has stayed pretty consistent over the last decade. But our narrative around it is out of proportion to the actual number of people killed because of the circumstances around the killing.

In any case, it's often easier to articulate the cost of freedom rather than its value.

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

#393

Post by malnourish »

mothballed wrote: post #381
AlecSchueler wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you propose that the family should not sue?

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

#394

Post by mothballed »

malnourish wrote: post #393
mothballed wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you propose that the family should not sue?

I don't blame a grieving family for suing, they probably have 1000 lawyers whispering in their ear about how putting their kid in a media campaign with an agenda and dragging them through a lawsuit where they have to re-live the suicide over and over will make their lives better.

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

#395

Post by Orygin »

mothballed wrote: post #357
nkrisc wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any case, if you kill one person and separately save ten people, you’ll still be prosecuted for killing that one person.

That's not the standard we hold medical care providers, pharmaceutical companies, or even cops to. Not that I'm saying it would justify it one way or another if we did.

It absolutely is? If a doctor is responsible for negligence resulting in the death of someone, they don't get a pass because they saved 10 other people in their career.

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

#396

Post by pxoe »

srb788 wrote: post #23
bigyabai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people tell you that Apple is behind on AI, they mean money. Not AI features, not AI hardware, AI revenue. And Apple is behind on that - they've got the densest silicon in the world and still play second fiddle to Nvidia. Apple GPU designs aren't conducive to non-raster workloads, they fell behind pretty far by obsessing over a less-profitable consumer market. For whatever it's worth, I also hope that OpenAI can…

Dude why does everything have to be about money? Why don't we celebrate Apple for having actual human values? I have a deep problem with many humans who just don't get it.

That's legitimately a crazy thing to say about an extremely revenue driven company with a $3 trillion valuation. We can see their "human values" play out in real time as they court and bribe politicians.

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

#397

Post by freestingo »

charcircuit wrote: post #303
luisfmh wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people that look to chatgpt for answers and help (as they've been programmed to do with all the marketing and capabilities from openai) should just die because they looked to chatgpt for an answer instead of google or their local suicide helpline? That doesn't seem reasonable, but it sounds to me like what you're saying. > So did the user. If he didn't want to talk to a chatbot he could have stopped at any time. T…

Firstly, people don't "just die" by talking to a chatbot. Secondly, if someone wants to die then I am saying it is reasonable for them to die.

A literal fedora wrote this comment.

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

#398

Post by hkpack »

itvision wrote: post #386

I'm appalled by the groupthink in this thread. Imagine if a suicidal person found a book that prompted them to kill themselves. Would you sue the author for that? This is exactly what we have here.

That is exactly not what we have here.

LLM is a new phenomenon and the rules dealing with it will be different than with books or any other prior media.

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

#399

Post by mothballed »

Orygin wrote: post #395
mothballed wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the standard we hold medical care providers, pharmaceutical companies, or even cops to. Not that I'm saying it would justify it one way or another if we did.

It absolutely is? If a doctor is responsible for negligence resulting in the death of someone, they don't get a pass because they saved 10 other people in their career.

It's not negligent to perform a procedure knowing it will kill some of the patients who would have otherwise lived healthy lives, though.

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

#400

Post by behringer »

footy wrote: post #382
behringer wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT is not a human, it can't know if it's doing the right thing or not. The parents should have been monitoring his usage and teaching him about LLMs.
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