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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

#601

Post by fzeindl »

geysersam wrote: post #560
fzeindl wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

> 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.

I find the the view cynic as well, that's why I wrote "apart from compassion and morality", which you failed to include in your quote.

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

#602

Post by notachatbot123 »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #233
notachatbot123 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I so agree very much. There is no reason for LLMs to be designed as human-like chat companions, creating a false sense of untechnology.

There are absolutely reasons for LLMs to be designed as human-like chat companions, starting with the fact that they’re trained on human speech and behavior, and what they do is statistically predict the most likely next token, which means they will statistically sound and act much like a human.

That's not a requirement for LLMs. Training can be done differently.

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

#603

Post by salawat »

novok wrote: post #221
salawat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You build the tool, you're culpable ultimately. I've made it a rule in my life to conduct myself as if I will be held to account for everything I ultimately build, and it's externalities. Helps keep my nose cleaner. Still managed to work on some things that keep me up at night though.

So if you build a chair and then someone uses it to murder someone, are you responsible for the murder?

I am not willing to grant the same level of exculpation on the basis of reasonable forseeability to a software/AI dev that I am to a carpenter making a chair. The history of our trade has in it found great joy in how to use things in ways they were never intended, which much more than a carpenter, puts a burden on us to take the propensity and possibility of abuse into account amongst ourselves.

So no. Mr. Altman, and the people who made this chair, are in part responsible. You aren't a carpenter. You had a responsibility to the public to constrain this thing, and to be as ahead of it as humanly possible, and the number of AI as therapist startups I've seen in the past couple years, even just as passion projects from juniors I've trained, have been met with the same guiding wisdom: go no further. You are critically outside your depth, and you are creating a clear and evident danger to the public you are not yet mentally or sufficiently with it enough to mitigate all the risks of.

If I can get there it's pretty damn obvious.

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

#604

Post by silverliver »

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…

I hope AI never gets legislated where you live, and if it does, I hope other countries don't and absolutely pulverize your country and any chance of these nonsensical reactionary laws taking hold elsewhere.

The solution to some people being susceptible to influence is not to cover the entire world with styrofoam. Mind you, I too stared suicide in the eyes and unlike you, I was not lucky enough to escape unscathed. That said, I will never propose something as unhinged as this.

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

#605

Post by morpheos137 »

400thecat wrote: post #572
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

The difference is a book can't talk back to you in an interactive way.

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

#606

Post by morpheos137 »

coremoff wrote: post #375
dpassens wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Central to the trolley problem is that you're in a _runaway_ trolley. In this case, OpenAI not only chose to start the trolley, they also chose to not brake even when it became apparent that they were going to run somebody over.

The tradeoff suggested above (not saying that it's the right way around or correct) is: * If you provide ChatGPT then 5 people who would have died will live and 1 person who would have lived will die. ("go to the doctor" vs "don't tell anyone that you're suicidal") * If you don't provide ChatGPT then 1 person who would have died will live and 5 people who would have lived will die. Like many things, it's a tradeoff a…

Thats a speculative argument and would be laughed out of court.

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

#607

Post by morpheos137 »

gooodvibes wrote: post #55
kayodelycaon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Reddit is a major source of their training material. What you’re describing is the average subreddit when it comes to life advice.

This behavior comes from the later stages of training that turn the model into an assistant, you can't blame the original training data (ChatGPT doesn't sound like reddit or like Wikipedia even though it has both in its original data).

It is shocking to me that 99% of people on YC news don't understand that LLMs encode tokens not verbatim training data. This is why I don't understand the NYT lawsuit against openAI. I can't see ChatGPT reproducing any text verbatim. Rather it is fine grained encoding of style in a multitude of domains. Again LLMs do not contain training data, they are a lossy compression of what the training data looks like.

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

#608

Post by AlecSchueler »

scotty79 wrote: post #573
AlecSchueler wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Net negative or net positive doesn't really matter. If there are aspects of it that are causing children to kill themselves then we should be able to discuss that without people rolling their eyes and saying "yeah yeah think of the children."

We can have the benefits while also trying to limit the harms.

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

#609

Post by hypertele-Xii »

throwawaysoxjje wrote: post #249
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slaves do not lack agency. That's one of the reasons the Bible, specifically Exodus, is such a thrilling read.

A story where slaves escape through deus ex machina is probably not exactly a great example

Deus ex machina refers to a rhetoric device in fiction, which the Bible is not.

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

#610

Post by Dilettante_ »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #596
Dilettante_ wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Incredible framing, leaving absolutely no room for a rebuttal to have any legitimate, reasonable position.

anyone is welcome to state their legitimate, reasonable position against gun controls

I believe the de-utility of risk of school shootings is less than the utility of having people have the freedom to own guns.
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