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OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

futurism.com

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Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#3
> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here.

With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police. From there:

> "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelberg during a conversation in July, after the 56-year-old conveyed his suspicions that an Uber Eats package signaled an assassination attempt. "This fits a covert, plausible-deniability style kill attempt."

As a species we are so not ready for this tech.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#4
post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

Sycophancy is a known flaw in ChatGPT.

Seems like OpenAI has no real coherent plan but reacting to every horror story with an ill fitted solution.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#5
post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

It’s a technology that tends to generate output misrepresenting its own capabilities in dangerous ways. Among other things it may misrepresent.

It’s weird these companies are allowed to operate, at least in the way that they are.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#6
post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

It’s a technology that tends to generate output misrepresenting its own capabilities in dangerous ways. Among other things it may misrepresent. It’s weird these companies are allowed to operate, at least in the way that they are.

[dead]

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#7
This is exactly why a lot of people are running local LLMs or moving toward privacy-first platforms

we recently shipped secure mode on https://www.agentsea.com.

With Secure Mode, all chats run either on open-source models or models hosted on our own servers - so you can chat with AI without worrrying about privacy.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#8
post #4
post #3

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…

Sycophancy is a known flaw in ChatGPT. Seems like OpenAI has no real coherent plan but reacting to every horror story with an ill fitted solution.

They tried to mitigate sycophancy in the GPT-5 release. Guess what happened?

A lot of users started complaining that "GPT-5 sucks, my AI now HATES me". And OpenAI relented.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#9
post #7

This is exactly why a lot of people are running local LLMs or moving toward privacy-first platforms we recently shipped secure mode on https://www.agentsea.com . With Secure Mode, all chats run either on open-source models or models hosted on our own servers - so you can chat with AI without worrrying about privacy.

Given that this is in response to a ChatGPT user who killed his mother and then himself, I'm not sure that positioning your product as being more secure than ChatGPT is wise, because your marketing here suggests either:

1. Profound tone-deafness about appropriate contexts for privacy messaging

2. Intentional targeting of users who want to avoid safety interventions

3. A fundamental misunderstanding of your ethical obligations as an AI provider

None of these interpretations reflect well on AgentSea's judgment or values.

Re: OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police

#10
post #7

This is exactly why a lot of people are running local LLMs or moving toward privacy-first platforms we recently shipped secure mode on https://www.agentsea.com . With Secure Mode, all chats run either on open-source models or models hosted on our own servers - so you can chat with AI without worrrying about privacy.

There is a very strong use case for less-powerful but local LLMs, and there's going to be a big expansion in that area in the next couple years. So big, I'll bet that all the major AI players will do everything they can to cripple them.
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