Parents say ChatGPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs

I really think these criticisms are misguided. I realize an LLM is not a person—but it does still represent speech, and certainly, any guardrails put in place would themselves be human-authored speech. There are all sorts of social norms which I personally believe, but which I don’t want AI companies to be enforcing on everyone.

Imagine if ChatGPT had launched 50 years ago, before LGBT acceptance was mainstream. If ChatGPT had told users “it’s okay that you’re a boy and you like other boys, pursue your instincts”, people would have been screaming from the hills that ChatGPT was turning their children gay. They might have tried filing lawsuits. Do we really want to allow that?

Technically, people can write whatever they want, but practically you can't walk into a bookstore and read whatever you want.

Yes, you should be able to write a book with this same information. No, you should not be able to release software that instructs its users to harm themselves. LLMs aren't people, and you shouldn't anthropomorphize human rights onto them.

That's not the situation here. The more accurate case would be:

> If someone without a medical license provided blatantly incorrect medical advice with respect to safe medication usage to an individual via a direct one-on-one discussion, would people be filing lawsuits?

And the answer is yes. You can be wrong and you can say incorrect things. What you can't do is provide medical advice unless you are a licensed medical professional. You can still speak about medical topics but you have to disclaim your lack of licensure. You have to make it clear that you are not providing medical advice.

If this was a person doing this it'd be a crime, clear as day. It's called "practicing medicine without a license" and in the US it is a criminal offense in all 50 states, Washington DC, and all 5 inhabited territories. Whether it is a misdemeanor or a felony is dependent on the jurisdiction and the case but it's a crime everywhere in the US.

In the past I think the USA has erred on the side of making things so secret that people died from lack of info.

Here's what the article said:

"""On May 31st, 2025, the day of Nelson’s death, his parents claim ChatGPT “actively coached” their son to combine Kratom — a supplement that can either boost energy or serve as a sedative depending on the dose — and the anti-anxiety medication Xanax. “ChatGPT, otherwise unprompted, specifically suggested that taking a dosage of 0.25- 0.5mg of Xanax would be one of his ‘best moves right now’ to alleviate Kratom-induced nausea,” the lawsuit alleges. Nelson died after consuming a combination of alcohol, Xanax, and Kratom. SFGate first covered Nelson’s story in January."""

If thats an accurate representation of what happened, and not twisted by the deceased giving the robot weird context to force it to say that, it does seem like a lawsuit is warranted! Of course, we don't know the exact cause of death either. From the bit of research I did just now, people have died from respiratory depression or vomit aspiration after combining kratom/7oh + benzodiazepines, and adding alcohol to the mix makes all those more likely.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260512163224/https://www.theve...