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

nytimes.com

511–520 of 614 posts

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

#511

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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.

I'll take your ad hominem as an admission you cannot find falsehood in what I'm saying.

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

#512

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Losers aren't talked about, they just lose. The pitchfork crowd is going to be out to get the AI innovators, one way or another. There's no amount of 'safety training' that will exonerate them. Gemini got burned, now its OpenAIs turn. So the calculus is very simple: Do the absolute minimum that's required, and ship it. Sam is proving himself very capable, very rational. OpenAI could scarce wish for a more politically…

Yikes. You’ve mistaken sociopathy for strategy. “Do the absolute minimum” only sounds rational if you’ve already decided other people’s lives have no value. The real pitchfork crowd isn’t coming for innovators; they’re coming for people who think dead teenagers are an acceptable cost of beating Google’s press release by a day.

[dead]

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

#513

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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.

Have you actually used Claude Opus 4.1? It is right far more than it is wrong.

How could you know?

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

#514

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If I had a dime for every "CUDA is worthless" comment I've seen since the crypto craze, I could fund the successor to TSMC out of pocket. Whatever the case is, the raster approach sure isn't winning Apple and AMD any extra market share. Barring any "spherical cow" scenarios, Nvidia won.

Think of a future where spatial analog rules over binary legacy as the latter is phased out. Now you can see where the bets are wrong.

Imagine a future where electricity is phased out and computers run on cotton candy. Checkmate, Apple!

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

#515

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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.

"The weakening of the family unit" sounds like a dog whistle but if you have concrete examples of what you think we could otherwise be doing then I'm genuinely keen to hear about it.

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

#516

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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.

These things are addictive though. They're often literally engineered to maximise engagement, and the money that goes into that completely dwarfs the power of schools and parents.

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

#517

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?

We kinda do that blaming every new media for particular teens suicide. Some teens are suicidal. They always have been. When you are a teen your brain undergoes traumatic transformation. Not everyone gets to the other side safely. Same as with many other transformations and diseases. Yet every time new medium is found adjacent to some particular suicide we repeat the same tired line that creator of this medium should…

Except loads of us are talking about the dangers of social media and have been for the past ten years only to receive exactly the same hand waving and sarcastic responses as you see in this thread. Now the ultimate gaslighting of "the discussion didn't even happen."

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

#518

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Buddy, Tim Cook wasn't hired for his human values. He was hired because he could stomach suicide nets at Foxconn and North Korean slaves working in iPhone factories. He was hired because he can be friends with Donald Trump while America aids-and-abets a genocide and turns a blind eye to NSO Group. He was hired because he'd be willing to sell out the iPhone, iTunes and Mac for software services at the first chance he…

I post this not for you directly, who has made up your mind completely, but for anyone else who might be interested in this question. "Tim Cook, was asked at the annual shareholder meeting by the NCPPR, the conservative finance group, to disclose the costs of Apple’s energy sustainability programs, and make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable. Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic displ…

"Deliver teary-eyed defense of your useless self-conducted audit" is probably the #1 job requirement for a marketing professional like Cook.

If you're fully bought-into the rube who's handing Donald Trump a gold placard, then boy have I got some bridges to sell you...

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

#519

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.

This can't help but remind me of the Whispering Earring [0]. "Better for you if you take me off."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42756942

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

#520

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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…

Apple is a consumer product company. “There’s a lot of money in selling silicon to other companies therefore Apple should have pivoted to selling silicon to other companies” is a weird fantasy-land idea of how businesses work. Idk maybe it’s legit if your only view of the world is through capital and, like, financial narratives. But it’s not how Apple has ever worked, and very very few consumer companies would attemp…

It's not a fantasy-land idea at all. Apple has already tried penetrating the datacenter before, they've proven they can ship a product to market if they want to. They just don't. They don't want to support Nvidia drivers or complex GPGPU primatives or non-raster GPU architectures or cross-platform acceleration libraries. Which is frankly an braindead decision from the opportunity cost side of things; if your consumers don't care, why not deliver what developers want?

Apple can have their cake and eat it here. If they reacted fast enough (eg. ~2018) then they could have had a CUDA competitor in-time for the crypto and AI craze - that's a fact! But they missed out on those markets because they had their blinders on, dead-to-rights focused on the consumer market they're losing control over. It's starting to verge on pathetic how gimped the Mac is for a "real computer" product.

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