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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

#571

Post by jrflowers »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #243
broker354690 wrote: post #109

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.

I like this post because the implication is that there’s a law called Section 230 that means everything is legal online. Like “that would be totally illegal but it happened on the information superhighway, section 230 baybee!!”

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

#572

Post by 400thecat »

podgietaru wrote: post #63

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…

imagine suing a library for having lent you a copy of "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe

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

#573

Post by scotty79 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #517
scotty79 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Was Facebook sued for teen suicide? Did it lose or at least settled?

Facebook is not the same as ai chat. Facebook influence on mental health is negative and visible in research. The jury is still out on AI but it might as well turn out it has huge net positive effect on well being.

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

#574

Post by scotty79 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #564
geysersam wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only acceptable number of suicides for it to cause is zero, and it's not a moral panic to believe that.

What actually causes suicide is really hard to pinpoint. Most people wouldn't do it even if their computer told them to kill themselves every day.

My personal belief is that at some point in the future you might get a good estimate of likelihood that a person commits suicide with blood test or a brain scan.

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

#575

Post by username332211 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #564
geysersam wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only acceptable number of suicides for it to cause is zero, and it's not a moral panic to believe that.

Would the same hold for other forms of communication and information retrieval, or should only LLMs be perfect in that regard? If someone is persuaded to commit suicide by the information found trough normal internet search, should Google/Bing/DDG be liable?

Do you believe a book should be suppressed and the author made liable, if a few of its readers commit suicide because of what they've read? (And, before you ask, that's not a theoretical question. Books are well known to cause suicides, the first documented case being a 1774 novel by Goethe.)

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

#576

Post by ETH_start »

podgietaru wrote: post #63

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…

[dead]

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

#577

Post by AlecSchueler »

mothballed wrote: post #530
AlecSchueler wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

We saw big jumps in deaths of kids by firearm[0] (+~50% in 2 years) and poisoning[1] around mid 2020 to 2021. The biggest thing I know of that happened around the time that a lot of these deaths started jumping up, is we started isolating kids. From family, from grandma, from friends, from school, and from nature. Even when many of these isolating policies or attitudes were reversed, we forgot that kids and teenagers…

You've misunderstood. I'm asking how you suggest we go about strengthening the family unit or what other steps you believe we could take that would place the responsibility for societal improvement on the right shoulders.

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

#578

Post by aucisson_masque »

ChatGPT is like a friend giving bad advice. Is it legally wrong ? I don’t think so, at the end no one takes decision for you.

I understand it can make suicide easier by giving instructions on how to do, but if we are honest such instructions are already available on the internet, ChatGPT wouldn’t know otherwise how to answer.

It is the responsibility of OpenAI to make sure that he gives good advice on such sensible matters, but it is also a tool designed to satisfy users need.

If someone asked him how to fight back on depression, I’m sure it would give detailed and satisfying answers.

At the end, I believe it’s all about user’s need. Even without ChatGPT, if someone doesn’t make the call to suicide prevention hotline, he won’t get help.

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

#579

Post by aucisson_masque »

nkrisc wrote: post #329
edanm wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ChatGPT has helped people be saved who might otherwise have died (e.g. by offering good medical advice that saved them), are all those lives saved also something you "attribute" to OpenAI? I don't know if ChatGPT has saved lives (thought I've read stories that claim that, yes, this happened). But assuming it has, are you OK saying that OpenAI has saved dozens/hundreds of lives? Given how scaling works, would you b…

In any case, if you kill one person and separately save ten people, you’ll still be prosecuted for killing that one person.

There is law and there is moral tho. Sometimes the two doesn’t coincide but I know which one I put on top of the other.

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

#580

Post by pembrook »

lowsong wrote: post #521
pembrook wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Falsehood in... what exactly? This is a horrible tragedy, and you've taken the opportunity to complain about your perceived bias in a news agency instead of engaging with the actual topic. From one of your other comments in this thread: > Just look at all the evidence presented in this non-biased, objective article with no financial incentive to incite moral panic…obviously chatgpt is guilty of murder here! Who cares…

I think you missed the part where the kid ignored the repeated help messaging from chatgpt and twisted it into giving this information by lying about creating a fictional story. Also, these are just the most inflammatory excerpts selected by a lawyer trying to win a case. Without the full transcript, and zero context around this kids life in the real world, to claim ChatGPT is at fault here is just wild.

At what point do you ascribe agency or any responsibility to the actual humans involved here (the 17 year old, his parents, his school, his community, etc.)?

While tragic, blaming [new thing the kids are doing] is fundamentally stupid as it does nothing to address the real reasons this kid is dead now. In fact, it gives everyone an "out" where they don't have to face up to any uncomfortable realities.

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