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Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#81

Post by kiba »

__egb__ wrote: post #68
K0balt wrote: post #55

It seems like there was a long, downward spiral associated with this child’s use of character.ai that the parents were aware of, had him sent to therapy over, etc. My question here is, what the hell were the parents doing, not removing this obviously destructive intrusion in his life? This reads to me the same as if he had been using drugs but the parents didn’t take away his stash or his paraphernalia. For the sake…

We had a similar situation in our family and we tried teaching mindful screen habits. We still lost because we couldn’t do anything about the school screen (chromebook). If we took that away at home it just provided an excuse for not doing schoolwork. We contacted teachers about our child downloading and watching anime and playing games all day in school. They wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything. We requested that the scho…

I would think you need a buy-in from these kids that they agree these influences are harmful and that they don't want it in their lives or at least moderated it. Otherwise it's an uphill battle to regulate those influences.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#82

Post by pryce »

pier25 wrote: post #62

Obviously the kid had issues and the chatbot can't really be blamed for that. OTOH it's also obvious if someone cannot distinguish a chatbot from a real person at an emotional level (not a rational one) they should not be allowed to use this.

I think it's fair to conclude that most people stating that they feel like killing themselves "have issues".

Yet: if there is some second person telling the above kid to go through with that, we don't see the kid "having issues" as exonerating the second person.

It is not at all clear to me why we would suddenly see the kid "having issues" as exonerating in the second case, if we replace the human with an LLM.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#83

Post by clipsy »

chx wrote: post #77
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #72

This is 100% a parenting issue. I'd also like to point out that his father's handgun was easily accessible.

[flagged]

The victim is the child who is now dead because his irresponsible parents left him with unfettered access to a loaded gun.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#84

Post by ndriscoll »

windlep wrote: post #74
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could try blocking his anime website on your home network. Then he can keep using the Chromebook for school work but can't access his favorite sites.

That's just an arms race. The kid will find a new favorite website to play games on, there seems no end to them. There's endless websites out there that are more appealing than doing homework. I have a very locked down network, there's always some new website that has games of some sort to play. If schools are going to provide these things, they should have the sites the kids might need to access white-listed and blo…

With SSDs costing under $50/TB now, it's hard to see why you couldn't put everything the kids need onto the laptop itself. The entirety of Wikipedia with pictures is 110 GB. Throw in a selection of reference books, videos, and software, and there's essentially no reason to have it go online. Provision it with the full year's worth of material at the beginning of the year and that's it.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#85

Post by upghost »

This is a really tragic story. It seems to present the impossible dillema. On the one hand, the beauty of "video-game-like" things is people who feel like they have nothing can have something that is theirs. On the other hand, if you feel like you have nothing, you might be more vulnerable to this sort of thing. If we have any moral philosphers in here, feel free to weigh in.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#86

Post by autumnstwilight »

kylecazar wrote: post #63

"Sewell, like many children his age, did not have the maturity or mental capacity to understand that the C.AI bot, in the form of Daenerys, was not real" How? Seriously, how? Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part -- but I grew up before AI and chatbots, and I'm certain I would understand it isn't real. I'm baffled by people engaging with these things for entertainment/companionship purposes.

Intellectually a 14 year old should certainly be able to understand the difference between a chatbot and a human, but there's a subset of emotionally unstable people (mostly teenagers) who become extremely attached to characters that are not real. There was an active subcommunity on Tumblr that believed they had a form of multiple personality disorder in which fictional characters were real, living inside their heads, and taking turns controlling their bodies. In some cases this was a literal spiritual belief in alternate universes. I think the terminology has moved on from "multiples" to "tulpas" and "shifting", but in any case it's still a pseudospiritual belief that fictional characters are real and you can contact them. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them think the "spirit" of their favorite character can influence a chatbot and communicate with them.

A decade or so prior to this, there was an incident on Livejournal summarized under the title "Snapes on an Astral Plane" (lol) in which there was ongoing conflict between three or so different women who each believed they were visiting Severus Snape on the astral plane in their dreams at night.

Embarrassingly, I have to admit that when I was a socially-isolated autistic 14 year old I also had an active fantasy life involving fictional characters, though I never got to the point of believing it was literally real. But my emotional state could be disproportionately affected by things that happened entirely in fiction, or in my head.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#87

Post by loocorez »

ndriscoll wrote: post #84
windlep wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just an arms race. The kid will find a new favorite website to play games on, there seems no end to them. There's endless websites out there that are more appealing than doing homework. I have a very locked down network, there's always some new website that has games of some sort to play. If schools are going to provide these things, they should have the sites the kids might need to access white-listed and blo…

With SSDs costing under $50/TB now, it's hard to see why you couldn't put everything the kids need onto the laptop itself. The entirety of Wikipedia with pictures is 110 GB. Throw in a selection of reference books, videos, and software, and there's essentially no reason to have it go online. Provision it with the full year's worth of material at the beginning of the year and that's it.

Definitely agree this is possible and a great idea, but I think one challenge might be if you need access on a school laptop to do the majority of the homework. Not sure if that’s the OP’s case

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#88

Post by meowster »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #70
__egb__ wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a similar situation in our family and we tried teaching mindful screen habits. We still lost because we couldn’t do anything about the school screen (chromebook). If we took that away at home it just provided an excuse for not doing schoolwork. We contacted teachers about our child downloading and watching anime and playing games all day in school. They wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything. We requested that the scho…

You could try blocking his anime website on your home network. Then he can keep using the Chromebook for school work but can't access his favorite sites.

It sounds like they need to get other parents involved and go to the school board and have them create a policy where only Google Classroom or whatever is whitelisted.

Other parents are going to fight that though because it's a free pacifier for their kids.

Re: Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?

#89

Post by pier25 »

pryce wrote: post #82
pier25 wrote: post #62

Obviously the kid had issues and the chatbot can't really be blamed for that. OTOH it's also obvious if someone cannot distinguish a chatbot from a real person at an emotional level (not a rational one) they should not be allowed to use this.

I think it's fair to conclude that most people stating that they feel like killing themselves "have issues". Yet: if there is some second person telling the above kid to go through with that, we don't see the kid "having issues" as exonerating the second person. It is not at all clear to me why we would suddenly see the kid "having issues" as exonerating in the second case, if we replace the human with an LLM.

Let me preface my comment by saying I did attempt suicide many years ago and I did have issues. I wasn't being sarcastic. Suicide is not something a healthy person would attempt.

That said, when I wrote my previous comment I hadn't read the whole article. I had missed the part where the chatbot encouraged him to "come home". I still don't think the chatbot is responsible. I do think it's negligence for the bots of a company to engage in these conversations about suicide and/or not sound an alarm.

Plus I would question if minors should be allowed to use these service or even social media. But that's another rabbit hole.

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