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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

#491

Post by AnIrishDuck »

dragonwriter wrote: post #172
AnIrishDuck wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that. I don't think that's the right paradigm here. These models are hyper agreeable. They are intentionally designed to mimic human thought and social connection. With that kind of machine, "Suicidal person deliberately bypassed safeguards to indulge more deeply in their ideation" still seems like a pretty bad failure mode to me. > Vanilla OpenAI…

> They deliberately are designed to mimic human thought and social connection. No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language , not human thought. (And one of the big sources of data for that was mass scraping social media.) > But this, to me, feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things. Right. Focus on quantity implies that th…

> No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language, not human thought.

My opinion is that language is communicated thought. Thus, to mimic language, at least really well, you have to mimic thought. At some level.

I want to be clear here, as I do see a distinction: I don't think we can say these things are "thinking", despite marketing pushes to the contrary. But I do think that they are powerful enough to "fake it" at a rudimentary level. And I think that the way we train them forces them to develop this thought-mimicry ability.

If you look hard enough, the illusion of course vanishes. Because it is (relatively poor) mimcry, not the real thing. I'd bet we are still a research breakthrough or two away from being able to simulate "human thought" well.

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

#492

Post by lowsong »

pembrook wrote: post #480
lowsong wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do AI apologists, like you, live in some parallel universe? One where it's acceptable to call the suicide of a vulnerable teenager "media attention bait". You should be ashamed of yourself.

No the NYT should be ashamed of itself for using this tragic story to generate clicks and sell subscriptions/ads. They are quite literally profiting financially off of this teens death while spreading false moral panic at the same time, making us all dumber in the process. Do you also believe that video games and music led to columbine? The NYT got a lot of attention for suggesting that at the time as well.

This is just sad. Assuming you’re not simply a troll or LLM, please introspect your behaviour.

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

#493

Post by slg »

rpdillon wrote: post #392
insane_dreamer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Roughly an hour after this comment was made, someone walked into the church at a Catholic school, killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, shot 17 other people including 14 children, and then turned the gun on himself.[1] "Predominantly media hype" indeed.

[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-...

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

#494

Post by rpdillon »

slg wrote: post #493
rpdillon wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Roughly an hour after this comment was made, someone walked into the church at a Catholic school, killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, shot 17 other people including 14 children, and then turned the gun on himself.[1] "Predominantly media hype" indeed. [1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-...

Yep, an excellent illustration of the point. Two dead, a dozen injured. What other gun violence happened this week that we'll never hear about?

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

#495

Post by mcdeltat »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #413
mcdeltat wrote: post #378

Many people focusing a lot on the interaction between the guy and ChatGPT, and I would like to provide a different perspective as someone who's been in a similar position. If you are seriously coming close to ending your own life, so many things around you have gone awry. Generally, people don't want to die. Consider: if an acquaintance suggested to you how a noose could be made, would you take the next step and hang…

Mental health is a lot more complicated than that. A visible external cause isn’t necessary. Things are completely normal people wouldn’t have any problem with can be extremely traumatizing to someone else Teenagers may not have the life experience to handle what adults find simple. Neural divergence can be a major factor as well. Telling a child with ADHD they just need to try harder is a recipe for life-long self-h…

This is exactly my point. I said "life failed him" not "he failed life". All of your examples are the environment around you not giving you sufficient support. Struggling because you have had traumatising experiencing or neurodivergence should not be normalised. Labelleing someone as neurodivergent shouldn't be an excuse for us to be ok with them suffering. Getting to the point of considering suicide should be seriously examined. Society needs to do better to support people of all varieties.

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

#496

Post by lp0_on_fire »

habinero wrote: post #458
msgodel wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. The companies developing these LLMs are throwing dump trucks full of money at them like we’ve not seen before. They choose to ignore glaring issues with the technology because if they don’t, some one else will.

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

#497

Post by mcdeltat »

e-khadem wrote: post #422
mcdeltat wrote: post #378

Many people focusing a lot on the interaction between the guy and ChatGPT, and I would like to provide a different perspective as someone who's been in a similar position. If you are seriously coming close to ending your own life, so many things around you have gone awry. Generally, people don't want to die. Consider: if an acquaintance suggested to you how a noose could be made, would you take the next step and hang…

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…

My point is why should these things be the difference between life or death in the first place? Why are they struggling silently? Why are they researching suicide methods? Just because it's common doesn't mean we should rest our argument. Society has failed to put these people in such scenarios where they are so distressed they turn to self harm.

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

#498

Post by slg »

rpdillon wrote: post #494
slg wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly an hour after this comment was made, someone walked into the church at a Catholic school, killed an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, shot 17 other people including 14 children, and then turned the gun on himself.[1] "Predominantly media hype" indeed. [1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/live-updates-...

Yep, an excellent illustration of the point. Two dead, a dozen injured. What other gun violence happened this week that we'll never hear about?

Has there been some other incident of gun violence this week that resulted in 3 deaths and 17 injuries that hasn't been reported?

According to Wikipedia[1] this is the largest mass shooting this year in terms of number of injuries. I guess that isn't worth reporting in the media.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

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

#500

Post by [deleted] »

Towaway69 wrote: post #420
killerstorm wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google is responsible" is equivalent to "let's burn bad books".

Ok why do we humans have to take responsibility? Why can't I declare myself to be a "company" (which is only responsible to shareholders) and then never take resosibility for my actions? Why are we humans burdened down with moral responsibility while companies can jerk that responsibility because .... well because they are a "company". After all, companies are made of what? People. People make companies and people ta…

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