Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 614 posts

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

#441

Post by msgodel »

habinero wrote: post #439
itvision wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you really blaming a child in crisis for not having the ability to get a psychiatrist? We regulate plenty of things for safety in highly effective and practical ways. Seatbelts in cars. Railings on stairs. No lead in paint.

The problem is there's no way to build anything like a safety rail here. If you had it your way teens, likely everyone else too wouldn't be allowed to use computers at all without some kind of certification.

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

#442

Post by jojomodding »

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…

There are consequences to speech. If you and I are in conversation and you convince me (repeatedly, over months, eventually successfully) to commit suicide then you will be facing a wrongful death lawsuit. If you publicize books claiming known falsehoods about my person, you'll be facing a libel lawsuit. And so on.

If we argue that chatbots are considered constitutionally protected speech of their programmers or whatever, then the programmers should in turn be legally responsible. I guess this is what this lawsuit mentioned in the article is about. The principle behind this is not just about suicide but also about more mundane things like the model hallucinating falsehoods about public figures, damaging their reputation.

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

#443

Post by habinero »

ACCount37 wrote: post #435
Orygin wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Triage exists. And when the shit hits the fan, it takes the form of "this one isn't worth trying to save, but this one might be". It's callous and cold, and it results in more lives saved than trying to save everyone. Does ChatGPT, on the net, save more people than it dooms? Who knows. Plenty of anecdotes both ways, but we wouldn't have the reliable statistics for a long time.

Triage exists because in a mass casualty event, medical resources need to go to the most urgent cases first.

Triage is not a punch card that says if you drag 9 people out of a burning building, you can shoot someone on the street for free.

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

#444

Post by mothballed »

Orygin wrote: post #437
mothballed wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they would otherwise live healthy lives, why perform the procedure? Most likely the patient is informed by the practitioner about the risks and they can make an informed decision. That is not the case about ChatGPT where openAI will sell it as the next best thing since sliced bread, with a puny little warning below the page. Even worse when you see all the "AI therapy" apps that pop up everywhere, where the user m…

Because sometimes you don't know with certainty on an individual basis, only a population basis, who is better off from the procedure.

Maybe you are the one in-a-billion who dies from a vaccine, from a disease that unknowably you would never contract or would only contract it in a mild way. The doctors know if they administer it enough times they will absolutely kill someone, but they do it to save the others, although they will pretty much never bluntly put it like that for your consideration.

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

#445

Post by Workaccount2 »

dartharva wrote: post #349
Workaccount2 wrote: post #66

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…

A commenter above in this thread posted the full complaint, which contains the actual chats. Read through them, seriously, they are beyond horrifying: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QYyZnGjRgXZY6kR5FA3My1xB3a9...

My comment is based on reading over the complaint, but in reality the case will involve the full context of each chat as well the the users full usage history. Understand that the complaint presented was written by the family's attorney, so it is going to be the absolute strongest construction of "ChatGPT is a killer, and OpenAI is complacent" you can make from the pile of facts. Initial complaints like this are the click-bait/rage-bait of the legal world.

I'm not making a judgement here, just leveraging the internet wisdom that comes from decades of doing this kind of drill.

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

#446

Post by DSingularity »

podgietaru wrote: post #81
DSingularity wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoot man glad you are still with us.

Thank you. I am glad too, I sought help, and I got better. I think the state of mental health care is abysmal in a lot of places, and so I get the impulse to try to find help where ever you can. It's why this story actually hit me quite hard, especially after reading the case file. For anyone reading that feels like that today. Resources do exist for those feeling low. Hotlines, self-guided therapies, communities. In…

Yeah I see why you would say the state is abysmal. It’s an unfortunate reality.

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

#447

Post by mothballed »

jojomodding wrote: post #442
mothballed wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are consequences to speech. If you and I are in conversation and you convince me (repeatedly, over months, eventually successfully) to commit suicide then you will be facing a wrongful death lawsuit. If you publicize books claiming known falsehoods about my person, you'll be facing a libel lawsuit. And so on. If we argue that chatbots are considered constitutionally protected speech of their programmers or what…

I don't see how this goes any other way. The law is not going to make some 3rd rail for AI.

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

#448

Post by Gracana »

mothballed wrote: post #431
scotty79 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably healthier for them if they can afford it. Otherwise they would blame themselves for so badly losing track about where their son was mentally. In reality suicidality is most likely a disease of the brain and probability of saving him was very low regardless of circumstances. The damage was most likely accumulating for many years.

I remember how relieved the Sandy Hook families were after the Alex Jones judgement. Alex Jones said some vile things, but the biggest thing bothering those families was the death of their kids. But the families couldn't go after the murderer (who killed himself), or even the murderer's upbringing by the mother (Lanza shot her). They desperately needed someone to clamp down on, but everything directly proximal was ou…

Alex Jones made his money by convincing people that the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary were actors in a conspiracy, which resulted in them bein harassed endlessly. He even continued to attack them during the defamation trials. I think it's unfair to say he was merely "the closest vile person around with big pockets," he really was the cause of a lot of pain.

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

#449

Post by behringer »

mothballed wrote: post #431
scotty79 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably healthier for them if they can afford it. Otherwise they would blame themselves for so badly losing track about where their son was mentally. In reality suicidality is most likely a disease of the brain and probability of saving him was very low regardless of circumstances. The damage was most likely accumulating for many years.

I remember how relieved the Sandy Hook families were after the Alex Jones judgement. Alex Jones said some vile things, but the biggest thing bothering those families was the death of their kids. But the families couldn't go after the murderer (who killed himself), or even the murderer's upbringing by the mother (Lanza shot her). They desperately needed someone to clamp down on, but everything directly proximal was ou…

you're kidding right? Alex Jones would not stop telling everybody that the families made everything up to the point the families were getting death threats and phone calls non-stop, years after their children were murdered.

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

#450

Post by behringer »

fireflash38 wrote: post #412
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.

Classic. Blame the family. Diffuse responsibility. Same exact shit with social media: it's not our fault we made this thing to be as addictive as possible. It's your fault for using it. It's your moral failing, not ours.

It's not addictive, it's useful. By letting the government decide what we can do with it, you're neutering it and giving big business a huge advantage as they can run their own AI and don't require censoring it.
Post reply on HN