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

451–460 of 614 posts

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

#451

Post by mothballed »

behringer wrote: post #449
mothballed wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's you theory as to why Jones got a $1B judgement against him for vicious lies, while the people making death threats (none of which were Alex Jones) did not?

What sounds more like reality, awarding the entire GDP of the nation of Granada to compensate for dead kids, or because lies were told that other idiots used to propagate mean threats?

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

#452

Post by idle_zealot »

rsynnott wrote: post #299
idle_zealot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In that extreme case the "packaging requirements" would be labeling the thing not as a boiler, but as dangerous explosive scrap.

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

#453

Post by habinero »

UltraSane wrote: post #402
ceejayoz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, Claude does know a LOT more than I do about most things… Plenty of people can confidently act like they know a lot without really having that knowledge.

So you are denying that LLMs actually contain real knowledge?

They contain training data and a statistical model that might generate something true or it might generate garbage, both with equal confidence. You need to already know the answer to determine which is which.

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

#454

Post by mothballed »

Gracana wrote: post #448
mothballed wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how anyone can look at the $1B judgement and not decide it was about $10M of "lied about the kids" and $990M of "we can't get the murderer so here's some money from the nearest evil rich guy we could pin something on."

As far as I know they didn't assign those kind of liabilities to the individuals that actually contacted the families to harass them, it's pretty clear the $1B wasn't just about harassment by people (who weren't Jones) that did it informed by his lies.

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

#455

Post by slibhb »

regentbowerbird wrote: post #424
slibhb wrote: post #411

It's notable that the NYT is suing OpenAI while publishing this article (and at least one other) about ChatGPT's involvement in suicides. Well, I imagine more people kill themselves after reading Nietzsche. In my view, OpenAI has enough safeguards in place. If the metric we aim for is "zero people get harmful advice from ChatGPT" then that's the same as making LLMs illegal.

> Well, I imagine more people kill themselves after reading Nietzsche. Must be nice to base your world view on things you imagine.

It's nice to be able to put things in perspective rather than glomming on to every monthyl moral panic in a sad attempt to reassure myself that I'm a good person.

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

#456

Post by idle_zealot »

novok wrote: post #220
Pedro_Ribeiro wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a hypothetical open source enthusiast who fell in love with GPT-OSS and killed his real wife because the AI told him to should only be himself held accountable, where as if it were GPT-5 commanding him to commit the same crime, it would extend into OpenAI's responsability? Your logic sounds reasonable in theory but on paper it's a slippery slope and hard to define objectively. On a broader note I believe govern…

After a certain point, people are responsible for what they do when they see certain words, especially words they know to be potentially inaccurate, fictional and have a lot of time to consider the actual reality of. A book is not responsible for people doing bad things, they are themselves. AI models are similar IMO, and unlike fiction books are often clearly labeled as such, repeatedly. At this point if you don't k…

> At this point if you don't know if an AI model is inaccurate and do something seriously bad, you should probably be a ward of the state.

You either think too highly of people, or too lowly of them. In any case, you're advocating for interning about 100 million individuals.

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

#457

Post by fireflash38 »

sonicggg wrote: post #343
gblargg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't child-proof everything. There are endless pits adults can get themselves into. If we really think that people with mental issues can't make sane choices, we need to lock them up. You can't have both at the same time: they are fully functioning adults, and we need to pad the world so they don't hurt themselves. The people around him failed, but they want to blame a big corporation because he used their fantas…

This is why we can't have nice things. It only takes a dead kid and a lawsuit for them to start over-regulating everything. Parents are trying hard to project the blame into anybody else but themselves.

Are you proposing parents have complete control over everything teenagers do?

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

#458

Post by habinero »

msgodel wrote: post #441
habinero wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I honestly don't hate the idea.

On a more serious note, of course there's ways to put in guard rails. LLMs behave like they do because of intentional design choices. Nothing about it is innate.

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

#459

Post by e-khadem »

slibhb wrote: post #438
e-khadem wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes things happen in life, and we don't have any agency. The person apparently had some medical issues as well. These excuses cannot be used to discount the role of ChatGPT in this. In highschool and at university I knew a few guys (n = 7) that attempted suicide. They all survived because they didn't have the knowledge of "known to work" methods and the survival rates of other methods. And then people noticed t…

> They all survived because they didn't have the knowledge of "known to work" methods and the survival rates of other methods Are we seriously going to pretend that "how to kill youself" is arcane knowledge that can only be unlocked by ChatGPT?

We are talking about isolated teenagers. Many movies (and stories) show drug overdose and self inflicted wounds as suicide methods, when in reality the survival rate without significant injuries is very high. Also in many cities it might be very hard to find a high place. The keypoint is that the signal to noise ratio is often too low (and deliberately so).

Edit: also consider that suicide rate is much higher after depression symptoms improve. Severely depressed people simply lack the energy to research the topic or acquire the tools. Even the OP's hanging failed for the first time. And they had to specifically look for some suitable material for the second time, and had to double check every step ...

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

#460

Post by fireflash38 »

behringer wrote: post #450
fireflash38 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if we didn't have these pesky regulations, we could have our burning rivers back! Those bastards took away our perfect asbestos too. The children yearn for the coal mines.

Businesses can, will, and have hurt people and trampled people's rights in the pursuit of money.

Post reply on HN