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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

#551
post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're using media coverage to critique my point that media coverage is overblown. That isn't what I'm doing. I pointed to an instance of a school shooting, asked you if any other shootings of that scale have occurred without receiving similar media coverage, and then pointed to reference material that indicates there have been any in this calendar year. I truly don't know what point you think you are making. Yes, n…

I'm saying that if we want to address the bulk of gun deaths, even entirely eliminating school shootings and mass shootings won't move the statistics more than by about 1%. I don't think most adults understand this, because they base their perception on what's reported, rather than reality. > What is the specific change you want to see in the media coverage? Editing to answer this, since it's a good question. I'm int…

I think the general argument that the media is not effectively using the attention these events draw is in direct conflict with the idea that these shootings are "predominantly media hype".

Also, I quite frankly think this mindset is naive to how both politics and the media work. Nothing materially is being done to reduce school shootings and today's tragedy is just another example of that. So why the fear that this need for a solution to general gun violence will be satiate by a solution to school shootings? We aren't getting any solution to school shootings either. Plus most of the mainstream media has a desire for neutrality that would prevent them from doing what you suggest. And those that aren't opposed to being seen as partisan and agree with you about overall gun violence are already advocating for greater gun control in a way that is not exclusively set to address school shootings.

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

#552
post #5

I would've thought that explicit discussion of suicide is one of those topics that chatbots will absolutely refuse to engage with. Like as soon as people started talking about using LLMs as therapists, it's really easy to see how that can go wrong.

It's not that easy when you consider that suicide is such a major part of human culture. I mean, some of the most well known works of literature involve it - imagine a chatbot that refused to discuss "Romeo and Juliet" because it would be unable to do so without explicit discussion of suicide.

Obviously you don't want chatbots encouraging people to actually commit suicide. But by the virtue of how this tech works, you can't really prevent that without blocking huge swaths of perfectly legitimate discourse.

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

#553

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…

Thanks for sharing your experience, and I hope you continue to be well.

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

#554

Why isn't OpenAI criminally liable for this? Last I checked: -Signals emitted by a machine at the behest of a legal person intended to be read/heard by another legal person are legally classified as 'speech'. -ChatGPT is just a program like Microsoft Word and not a legal person. OpenAI is a legal person, though. -The servers running ChatGPT are owned by OpenAI. -OpenAI willingly did business with this teenager, letti…

Is Google responsible if someone searches for a way to kill themselves, finds the means, and does it? What about the ISP, that actually transferred the bits? What about the forum, that didn't take down the post?

OpenAI's ChatGPT is not an intermediary. Google finds you speech that was produced by someone else. ISPs ferry the speech to your modem. Forums aggregate speech from actual humans who produced that speech and enable you to access that speech.

The group of human beings known as OpenAI is directly responsible for generating the speech that was sent to this child, and they intentionally did business with this child. They did not conduct speech from one entity to another- they produced the speech themselves.

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

#555
post #79
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sucks but the only solution is to make companies censor the models, which is a solution we all hate, so there’s that.

Thank you, “we just have to accept that these systems will occasionally kill children” is a perfect example of the type of mindset I was criticizing.

That statement is going to be true for anything short of a complete Panopticon where everyone and everything is watched 24/7 to nip any potential harm in the bud.

If you're not okay with that arrangement (why not?), then we're left to argue about which level of "will occasionally kill children" is acceptable.

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

#556

Why isn't OpenAI criminally liable for this? Last I checked: -Signals emitted by a machine at the behest of a legal person intended to be read/heard by another legal person are legally classified as 'speech'. -ChatGPT is just a program like Microsoft Word and not a legal person. OpenAI is a legal person, though. -The servers running ChatGPT are owned by OpenAI. -OpenAI willingly did business with this teenager, letti…

What's your argument here? Hosted LLM service shouldn't exist because they might read people's bad ideas back to them? ChatGPT has enough guardrails now that it often refuses productive prompts. It's actually very very hard to get it to do what this person did, arguably impossible to do unintentionally.

ChatGPT is a service and thus OpenAI should be exposed to even more liability than if they had sold the LLM to the user to be accessed offline. If the user had been running a local LLM, OpenAI would not have been responsible for generating the speech.

As it stands, the human beings called OpenAI willingly did business with this child, and willingly generated the speech that persuaded him to kill himself and sent it to him. That they used a computer to do so is irrelevant.

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

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you refuse to disclose to your patient the risks and considerations, so they can have fully informed consent, it absolutely is malpractice.

Consent can sometimes be a frustrated interpretation of it. Marissa Anderson missed an appointment (according to her, because she was feeling ill) after seeking a doctor's advice on dealing with some issues with her infant repeatedly vomiting and failure to take up food. Ultimately they figured out that the child was having trouble with some of the introduced food and would only take breast milk, but the doctors work…

Alright, so leaving aside the other details of this story and attempting to be as neutral as possible:

What is linked here is PART of a PCR (Patient Care Report) from a BLS (Basic Life Support, i.e. EMT, someone with ~160 hours of training), working for a transport agency, or on an IFT (interfacility) unit.

"No interventions" doesn't mean the patient was not unwell. In fact, "Impression: Dehydration". It means that the patient was stable, and that no interventions would be required from the BLS provider (because BLS providers cannot start IV fluids, though in limited situations they can maintain them).

"No acute life threats noted". As an EMT, then paramedic, then critical care paramedic, I probably transported 8,000+ patients. In 7,500+ of those, I would have made the exact same statement on my PCR. In EMS, acute life threats are "things that have a possibility of killing the patient before they get to our destination facility/hospital". The times I've noted "acute life threats" are times I've transported GSW victims with severed femoral arteries, and patients having a STEMI or in full cardiac arrest. The vast majority of my Code 3 transports (i.e. lights/sirens to the closest facility) have not had "acute life threats".

The child's destination on this PCR was not foster care but to a higher level of care (St Lukes Regional Medical Center in Boise, versus the smaller facility in Meridian).

A few notes: "child was found to be acutely stable" - acutely stable is not a thing. Also, the general expectation for a lower acuity interfacility transport is that no interventions en route are required.

As I said, I don't know about the bigger scenario of this, but what I do know is EMS PCRs, and it is very common for people to latch on to certain phrases as "gotchas". We talked often in our PCRs about assessing "sick/not sick". Being "not sick" didn't mean you didn't have a medical issue, nor did it mean you didn't belong at a hospital; what it solely meant was "this is a patient that we need to prioritize transporting to definitive care versus attempting to stabilize on scene before doing so".

I did catch these two points which give me question:

> Now, I am about to show you empirical evidence that my Grandson, Baby Cyrus, was violently kidnapped by Meridian police, without cause and without evidence, that Baby Cyrus was falsely declared to be in “imminent danger,” even though CPS and St. Luke’s hospital admitted that he was not, and that my daughter and son-in-law were illegally prosecuted in secret, without due process

That sounds like the issue was with the police, not with medical malpractice. I'm skeptical, though, of "illegal secret prosecutions".

> Nancy had made speeches around the country in national forums and was completing a video exposing the lack of oversight in Georgia’s Department of Family and Child Services (DFCS) as well as Child Protective Services (CPS) nationally; and started to receive lots of death threats. Unfortunately her video was never published as her and her husband were murdered, being found shot to death in March 2010.

> Listen, if people on the streets will murder someone else for a $100 pair of Air Jordan’s, you better believe that they will murder a Senator who threatens an $80 billion child trafficking cash machine.

Okay, we're turning into conspiracy theories here. Multiple autopsies ruled this as a murder-suicide.

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

#558

Why isn't OpenAI criminally liable for this? Last I checked: -Signals emitted by a machine at the behest of a legal person intended to be read/heard by another legal person are legally classified as 'speech'. -ChatGPT is just a program like Microsoft Word and not a legal person. OpenAI is a legal person, though. -The servers running ChatGPT are owned by OpenAI. -OpenAI willingly did business with this teenager, letti…

Section 230, without which Hacker News wouldn’t exist.

Section 230? I didn't know the outputs of ChatGPT were content generated by random users on the net. Does this mean AI truly stands for 'Actual Indians'?

Preposterous.

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

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Societies love theatres. Model guardrails are for chats what TSA is for air travel.

Society loves teenagers not being talked into suicide by a billionaire's brainchild. That's not theater.

ChatGPT doesn't cause a significant number of suicides. Why do I think that? It's not visible in the statistics. There are effective ways to prevent suicide, let's continue to work on those instead of giving in to moral panic.

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

#560

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…

> An AI Model designed to match my tone and be sycophantic to my every whim. It would have killed me. Matching tones and being sycophantic to every whims. Just like many really bad therapists. Only they are legally responsible if they cause a death, which makes them care (apart from compassion and morality). The criminal justice system is also a system for preventing individuals who perform unwanted action from doing…

> Only they are legally responsible if they cause a death, which makes them care

I see this kind of cynicism often on this site and I frankly find it inexplicable. It doesn't seem warranted. The vast majority of therapists clearly care about their patients.

On the other hand, people often don't give a shit about laws, even to their own detriment.

People are a lot more complicated than "I adjust behavior to maximize personal outcome in terms of $$, beep bop". In some cases we respond to incentives, of course, but having that be the only law to explain human behavior is patently ridiculous.

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