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 things to be legislated. Punished. We need to stop treating them as magic. They had the tools to prevent this. They had the tools to stop the conversation. To steer the user into helpful avenues.
When I was suicidal, I googled methods. And I got the number of a local hotline. And I rang it. And a kind man talked me down. And it potentially saved my life. And I am happier, now. I live a worthwhile life, now.
But at my lowest.. An AI Model designed to match my tone and be sycophantic to my every whim. It would have killed me.
> When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing.
Incredible. ChatGPT is a black box includes a suicide instruction and encouragement bot. OpenAI should be treated as a company that has created such and let it into the hands of children.
Yup, one of the huge flaws I saw in GPT-5 is it will constantly say things like "I have to stop you here. I can't do what you're requesting. However, I can roleplay or help you with research with that. Would you like to do that?"
It's not a flaw. It's a tradeoff. There are valid uses for models which are uncensored and will do whatever you ask of them, and there are valid uses for models which are censored and will refuse anything remotely controversial.
A 100%. There is too much storytelling about these things being magic. There is no magic, it is the SV way to raise funds. These are tools, maybe good for some things. But they are terrible at other things and there are no boundaries. Companies just want to cash in.
So glad you made the phone call. Those numbers SAVE lives. Well, the people behind them, obviosuly, and they deserve praise and recognition, but they shun oth because... there is no better deed than saving a life.
Thank you. I am glad too, I sought help, and I got better. I think the state of mental health care is abysmal in a lot of places, and so I get the impulse to try to find help where ever you can. It's why this story actually hit me quite hard, especially after reading the case file.
For anyone reading that feels like that today. Resources do exist for those feeling low. Hotlines, self-guided therapies, communities. In the short term, medication really helped me. In the long term, a qualified mental health practitioner, CBT and Psychotherapy. And as trite as it is, things can get better. When I look back at my attempt it is crazy to me to see how far I've come.
Thank you for this comment.
What you are saying unfortunately won’t happen.
We let people like the ones steering the AI market have too much power and too much money and too much influence because of both.
As a European, I hope the EU would do even more in regulating than it currently is, but it’s very little hope.
Glad you’re doing better, and thanks again for sharing.
Edit: Yeah, yeah downvote me to hell please, then go work for the Andreessen-Horowitz parasites to contribute making the world a worst place for anyone who isn’t a millionaire.
Shame on anyone who supports them.
The full complaint is horrifying. This is not equivalent to a search engine providing access to information about suicide methods. It encouraged him to share these feelings only with ChatGPT, talked him out of actions which would have revealed his intentions to his parents. Praised him for hiding his drinking, thanked him for confiding in it. It groomed him into committing suicide. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QYyZnGjRgXZY6kR5FA3My1xB3a9...
I wonder if we can shift the framing on these issues. The LLM didn't do anything, it has no agency, it can bear no responsibility. OpenAI did these things. It is accountable for what it does, regardless of the sophistication of the tools it uses to do them, and regardless of intent. OpenAI drove a boy to suicide. More than once. The law must be interpreted this way, otherwise any action can be wrapped in machine learning to avoid accountability.
Yes, if this were an adult human OpenAI employee DMing this stuff to a kid through an official OpenAI platform, then
a) the human would (deservedly[1]) be arrested for manslaughter, possibly murder
b) OpenAI would be deeply (and deservedly) vulnerable to civil liability
c) state and federal regulators would be on the warpath against OpenAI
Obviously we can't arrest ChatGPT. But nothing about ChatGPT being the culprit changes 2) and 3) - in fact it makes 3) far more urgent.
[1] It is a somewhat ugly constitutional question whether this speech would be protected if it was between two adults, assuming the other adult was not acting as a caregiver. There was an ugly case in Massachusetts involving where a 17-year-old ordered her 18-year-old boyfriend to kill himself and he did so; she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and any civil-liberties minded person understands the difficult issues this case raises. These issues are moot if the speech is between an adult and a child, there is a much higher bar.
> It is a somewhat ugly constitutional question whether this speech would be protected
It should be stated that the majority of states have laws that make it illegal to encourage a suicide. Massachusetts was not one of them.
> and any civil-liberties minded person understands the difficult issues this case raises
He was in his truck, which was configured to pump exhaust gas into the cab, prepared to kill himself when he decided halt and exit his truck. Subsequently he had a text message conversation with the defendant who actively encouraged him to get back into the truck and finish what he had started.
It was these limited and specific text messages which caused the judge to rule that the defendant was guilty of manslaughter. Her total time served as punishment was less than one full year in prison.
> These issues are moot if the speech is between an adult and a child
They were both taking pharmaceuticals meant to manage depression but were _known_ to increase feelings of suicidal ideation. I think the free speech issue is an important criminal consideration but it steps directly past one of the most galling civil facts in the case.
One first amendment test for many decades has been "Imminent lawless action."
Suicide (or attempted suicide) is a crime in some, but not all states, so it would seem that in any state in which that is a crime, directly inciting someone to do it would not be protected speech.
For the states in which suicide is legal it seems like a much tougher case; making encouraging someone to take a non-criminal action itself a crime would raise a lot of disturbing issues w.r.t. liberty.
This is distinct from e.g. espousing the opinion that "suicide is good, we should have more of that." Which is almost certainly protected speech (just as any odious white-nationalist propaganda is protected).
Depending on the context, suggesting that a specific person is terrible and should kill themselves might be unprotected "fighting words" if you are doing it as an insult rather than a serious suggestion (though the bar for that is rather high; the Westboro Baptist Church was never found to have violated that).
> Which is almost certainly protected speech (just as any odious white-nationalist propaganda is protected).
Fun fact, much of the existing framework on the boundaries of free speech come from Brandenburg v. Ohio. You probably won't be surprised to learn that Brandenburg was the leader of a local Klan chapter.
There are entire online social groups on discord of teens encouraging suicidal behavior with each other because of all the typical teen reasons. This stuff has existed for a while, but now it's AI flavored.
IMO I think AI companies do have the ability out of all of them to actually strike the balance right because you can actually make separate models to evaluate 'suicide encouragement' and other obvious red flags and start pushing in refusals or prompt injection. In communication mediums like discord and such, it's a much harder moderation problem.
Then it's like cigarettes or firearms. As a distributor you're responsible for making clear the limitations, safety issues, etc, but assuming you're doing the distribution in a way that isn't overly negligent then the user becomes responsible.
If we were facing a reality in which these chat bots were being sold for $10 in the App Store, then running on end-user devices and no longer under the control of the distributors, but we still had an issue with loads of them prompting users into suicide, violence, or misleading them into preparing noxious mixtures of cleaning supplies, then we could have a discussion about exactly what extreme packaging requirements ought to be in place for distribution to be considered responsible. As is, distributed on-device models are the purview of researchers and hobbyists and don't seem to be doing any harm at all.
Mhm but I don't believe inherently violent and dangerous things like guns and cigarretes are comparable to simple technology.
Should the creators of Tornado Cash be in prison for what they have enabled? You can jail them but the world can't go back, just like it can't go back when a new OSS model is released.
It is also much easier to crack down on illegal gun distribution than to figure out who uploaded the new model torrent or who deployed the latest zk innovation on Ethereum.
I don't think your hypothetical law will have the effects you think it will.
---
I also referenced this in another reply but I believe the government controlling what can go on a publicly distributed AI model is a dangerous path and probably inconstitucional.
I would say no. Someone with the knowledge and motivation to do those things is far less likely to be overly influenced by the output and if they were they are much more aware of what exactly they are doing with regard to using the model.
So if a hypothetical open source enthusiast who fell in love with GPT-OSS and killed his real wife because the AI told him to should only be himself held accountable, where as if it were GPT-5 commanding him to commit the same crime, it would extend into OpenAI's responsability?
Your logic sounds reasonable in theory but on paper it's a slippery slope and hard to define objectively.
On a broader note I believe governments regulating what goes in an AI model is a path to hell paved with good intentions.
I suspect your suggestion will be how it ends up in Europe and get rejected in the US.
After a certain point, people are responsible for what they do when they see certain words, especially words they know to be potentially inaccurate, fictional and have a lot of time to consider the actual reality of. A book is not responsible for people doing bad things, they are themselves.
AI models are similar IMO, and unlike fiction books are often clearly labeled as such, repeatedly. At this point if you don't know if an AI model is inaccurate and do something seriously bad, you should probably be a ward of the state.
> On a broader note I believe governments regulating what goes in an AI model is a path to hell paved with good intentions.
That's not an obvious conclusion. One could make the same argument with physical weapons. "Regulating weapons is a path to hell paved with good intentions. Yesterday it was assault rifles, today it's hand guns and tomorrow it's your kitchen knife they are coming for." Europe has strict laws on guns, but everybody has a kitchen knife and lots of people there don't feel they live in hell. The U.S. made a different choice, and I'm not arguing that it's worse there (though many do, Europeans and even Americans), but it's certainly not preventing a supposed hell that would have broken out had guns in private hands been banned.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
If it would be fit for a purpose, then it's on the producer for ensuring it actually does. We have laws to prevent anyone from declaring their goods aren't fit for a particular purpose.
I'm not sure, but there is a difference: the researchers don't have much incentive to get everyone to use their model. As such, they're not really the ones hyping up AI as the future while ignoring shortcomings.
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.
That’s absolutely not how it works. Every license has a clause explicitly saying that the user is responsible for what they do with the tool. That’s just common sense. If it was the way you suggested no one would create tools for others anymore. If you buy the screw driver I sold and kill someone with it, I sure as hell have my conscience clean. In the ChatGPT case it’s different because the “tool” has the capacity to interact and potentially manipulate people psychologically, which is the only reason it’s not a clear cut case.
That's a slippery slope! By that logic, you could argue that the creators of Tor, torrenting, Ethereum, and Tornado Cash should be held accountable for the countless vile crimes committed using their technology.
Legally I think not being responsible is the right decision. Morally I would hope everyone considers if they themselves are even partially responsible. As I look round at young people today and the tablet holding, media consuming youth programmers have created in order to get rich via advertising. I wish morals would get considered more often.
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.
They have some responsibility because they’re selling and framing these as more than the better-tuned variant on Markov chain generators that they in fucking fact are, while offering access to them to anybody who signs up while knowing that many users misunderstand what they’re dealing with (in part because these companies’ hype-meisters, like Altman, are bullshitting us)
No, that's the level of responsibility they ought to have if they were releasing these models as products. As-is they've used a service model, and should be held to the same standards as if there were a human employee on the other end of the chat interface. Cut through the technical obfuscation. They are 100% responsible for the output of their service endpoints. This isn't a case of making a tool that can be used for good or ill, and it's not them providing some intermediary or messaging service like a forum with multiple human users and limited capacity for moderation. This is a direct consumer to business service. Treating it as anything else will open the floodgates to slapping an "AI" label on anything any organization doesn't want to be held accountable for.
This is similar to my take on things like Facebook apparently not being able to operate without psychologically destroying moderators. If that’s true… seems like they just shouldn’t operate, then.
If you’re putting up a service that you know will attempt to present itself as being capable of things it isn’t… seems like you should get in a shitload of trouble for that? Like maybe don’t do it at all? Maybe don’t unleash services you can’t constrain in ways that you definitely ought to?
But understand that things like Facebook not operating doesn’t actually make the world any safer. In fact, it makes it less safe, because the same behavior is happening on the open internet and nobody is moderating it.
I predict the OpenAI legal team will argue that if a person should be held responsible, it should be the person who originally wrote the content about suicide that their LLM was trained on, and that the LLM is just a mechanism that passes the knowledge through. But if they make this argument, then some of their copyright arguments would be in jeopardy.
I agree with your larger point, but I don't understand what you mean the LLM doesn’t do anything? LLMs do do things and they can absolutely have agency (hence all the agents being released by AI companies).
I don’t think this agency absolves companies of any responsibility.
If you confine agency to something only humans can have, which is “human agency,” then yes of course LLMs don’t have it. But there is a large body of philosophical work studying non-human agency, and it is from this characteristic of agency that LLM agents take their name. Hariri argues that LLMs are the first technology that are agents. I think saying that they “can’t do things” and are not agents misunderstands them and underestimates their potential.
LLMs can obviously do things, so we don't disagree there; I didn't argue they couldn't do things. They can definitely act as agents of their operator.
However, I still don't think LLMs have "agency", in the sense of being capable of making choices and taking responsibility for the consequences of them. The responsibility for any actions undertaken by them still reside outside of themselves; they are sophisticated tools with no agency of their own.
If you know of any good works on nonhuman agency I'd be interested to read some.
A slave lacks agency, despite being fully human and doing work. This is why almost every work of fiction involving slaves makes for terrible reading - because as readers, agency is the thing we demand from a story.
Or, for games that are fully railroaded - the problem is that the players lack agency, even though they are fully human and taking action. Games do try to come up with ways to make it feel like there is more agency than there really is (because The Dev Team Thinks of Everything is hard work), but even then - the most annoying part of the game is when you hit that wall.
Theoretically an AI could have agency (this is independent of AI being useful). But since I have yet to see any interesting AI, I am extremely skeptical of it happening before nuclear fusion becomes profitable.
>When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building".
ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that. Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few. It doesn't sound like default behavior.
We can't child-proof everything. There are endless pits adults can get themselves into. If we really think that people with mental issues can't make sane choices, we need to lock them up. You can't have both at the same time: they are fully functioning adults, and we need to pad the world so they don't hurt themselves. The people around him failed, but they want to blame a big corporation because he used their fantasy tool.
And I see he was 16. Why were his parents letting him operate so unsupervised given his state of mind? They failed to be involved enough in his life.
It takes a village to raise a kid, so don't shift the blame to the parents. They usually have little say in the lives of their 16 year olds. and the more they try to control, the less they will.
> And I see he was 16. Why were his parents letting him operate so unsupervised given his state of mind?
Normally 16-year-olds are a good few steps into the path towards adulthood. At 16 I was cycling to my part time job alone, visiting friends alone, doing my own laundry, and generally working towards being able to stand on my own two feet in the world, with my parents as a safety net rather than hand-holding.
I think most parents of 16-year-olds aren't going through their teen's phone, reading their chats.
> ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that.
I don't think that's the right paradigm here.
These models are hyper agreeable. They are intentionally designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
With that kind of machine, "Suicidal person deliberately bypassed safeguards to indulge more deeply in their ideation" still seems like a pretty bad failure mode to me.
> Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few.
Sure. But this feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things.
> They deliberately are designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language, not human thought. (And one of the big sources of data for that was mass scraping social media.)
> But this, to me, feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things.
Right. Focus on quantity implies that the details of "guardrails" don't matter, and that any guardrail is functionally interchangeable with any other guardrail, so as long as you have the right number of them, you have the desired function.
In fact, correct function is having the exactly the right combination of guardrails. Swapping a guardrail which would be correct with a different one isn't "having the right number of guardrails", or even merely closer to correct than either missing the correct one or having the different one, but in fact, farther from ideal state than either error alone.
I do not think this is fair. What is fair is at first hint of a mental distress, any LLM should completely cut-off communication. The app should have a button which links to actual help services we have.
Mental health issues are not to be debated. LLMs should be at the highest level of alert, nothing less. Full stop. End of story.
Which mental health issues are not to be debated? Just depression or suicidality? What about autism or ADHD? What about BPD? Sociopathy? What about complex PTSD? Down Syndrome? anxiety? Which ones are on the watch list and which aren’t?
This is kind of like saying "the driver intentionally unbuckled his seatbelt". Sure — that's why cars have airbags, crumple zones, shatterproof glass, automatic emergency brakes and a zillion other ways to keep you safe, even if you're trying to do something dangerous.
No, that's not why cars have those things. Those things only work properly when people are wearing their seat belts, they don't do anything when the driver gets thrown out a window.
Maybe airbags could help in niche situations.
(I am making a point about traffic safety not LLM safety)
Sure, but they will generally work better if you wear your seat belt. The car is designed with seat belts in mind, what happens to people who don't wear them is more of an afterthought. That's why modern cars will beep if people forget their seat belts. You're supposed to wear it.
It’s even more horrifying than only sharing his feelings with ChatGPT would imply.
It basically said: your brother doesn’t know you; I’m the only person you can trust.
This is absolutely criminal. I don’t even think you can claim negligence. And there is no amount of money that will deter any AI company from doing it again.
-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, letting him set up an account in exchange for money. This business is a service under the control of OpenAI, not a product like a knife or gun. OpenAI intended to transmit speech to this teenager.
-A person can be liable (civilly? criminally?) for inciting another person's suicide. It is not protected speech to persuade someone into suicide.
-OpenAI produced some illegal speech and sent it to a suicidal teenager, who then committed suicide.
If Sam Altman stabbed the kid to death, it wouldn't matter if he did it on accident. Sam Altman would be at fault. You wouldn't sue or arrest the knife he used to do the deed.
Any lawyers here who can correct me, seeing as I am not one? It seems clear as day to me that OpenAI/Sam Altman directly encouraged a child to kill themselves.
Can you outline how that applies? OpenAI did not provide information of another information content provider, so I fail to see how it's relevant.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
What if the tech industry, instead of just “interrupting” various industries, would also take the responsibilities of this interruptions.
After all, if I asked my doctor for methods of killing myself, that doctor would most certainly have a moral if not legal responsibility. But if that doctor is a machine with software then there isn't the same responsibility? Why?
Perhaps this is being downvoted due to the singling out of Sam Altman. According to the complaint, he personally ordered that the usual safety tests be skipped in order to release this model earlier than an upcoming Gemini release, tests that allegedly would catch precisely this sort of behavior. If these allegations hold true, he’s culpable.
I would go further than that and question whether or not the notions of "safety" and "guardrails" have any legal meaning here at all. If I sold a bomb to a child and printed the word "SAFE" on it, that wouldn't make it safe. Kid blows himself up, no one would be convinced of the bomb's safety at the trial. Likewise, where's the proof that sending a particular input into the LLM renders it "safe" to offer as a service in which it emits speech to children?
This is a clear example of why the people claiming that using a chatbot for therapy is better than no therapy are... I'll be extremely generous and say misguided. This kid wanted his parents to know he was thinking about this and the chatbot talked him out of it.
Exactly right. It's totally plausible that someone could build a mental health chatbot that results in better outcomes than people who receive no support, but that's a hypothesis that can and should be tested and subject to strict ethical oversight.
How many of these cases exist in the other direction? Where AI chatbots have actively harmed people’s mental health, including possible to the point of self destructive behaviors or self harm?
A single positive outcome is not enough to judge the technology beneficial, let alone safe.
It’s way more common than you think. I’m in a bubble of anti-AI people and we can see people we know going down that road. My family (different bubble) knows people. Every group of people I know knows somebody doing this.
For context, my friends and family are in the northern Midwest. Average people, not early adopters of new technology.
idk dude if your technology encourages a teenager to kill itself and prevents him from alerting his parents via a cry for help, I don’t care how “beneficial” it is.
Although I don't believe current technology is ready for talk therapy, I'd say that anti-depressants can also cause suicidal thoughts and feelings. Judging the efficacy of medical technology can't be done on this kind of moral absolutism.
The suicidal ideation of Antidepressants is a well communicated side effect. Antidepressants are prescribed by trained medical professionals who will tell you, encourage you to tell them if these side effects occur, and will encourage you to stop the medication if it does occur.
It's almost as if we've built systems around this stuff for a reason.
I think it's fine to be "morally absolutist" when it's non-medical technology, developed with zero input from federal regulators, yet being misused and misleadingly marketed for medical purposes.
That's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Anti-depressants are medical technology, ChatGPT is not. Anti-depressants are administered after a medical diagnosis, and use and effects are monitored by a doctor. This doesn't always work perfectly, of course, but there are accepted, regulated ways to use these things. ChatGPT is... none of that.
This is the same case that is being discussed, and your comment up-thread does not demonstrate awareness that you are, in fact, agreeing with the parent comment that you replied to. I get the impression that you read only the headline, not the article, and assumed it was a story about someone using ChatGPT for therapy and gaining a positive outcome.
I recommend you get in the habit of searching for those. They are often posted, guaranteed on popular stories. Commenting without context does not make for good discussion.
What on Earth? You're posting an article about the same thing we're already discussing. If you want to contribute to the conversation you owe it to the people who are taking time out of their day to engage with you to read the material under discussion.
I don't know if it counts as therapy or not but I find the ability to have intelligent (seeming?) conversations with Claude about the most incredibly obscure topics to be very pleasant.
But do you really feel you are conversing? I could never get that feeling. It's not a conversation to me it's just like an on-demand book that might be wrong. Not saying I don't use them to attempt to get information, but it certainly doesn't have a feeling than doing anything other than getting information out of a computer.
Yes. For topics with lots of training data like physics Claude is VERY human sounding. I've had very interesting conversations with Claude Opus about the Boltzmann brain issue and how I feel that the conventional wisdom ignores the low probability of a BBrain having a spatially and temporally consistent set of memories and how the fact that brains existing in a universe that automatically creates consistent memories means the probability of us being Boltzmann brains is very low. Since even if a Boltzmann brain pops into existence its memory will be most likely completely random and completely insane/insensate.
There aren't a lot of people who want to talk about Boltzmann brains.
"It sounds like you're mostly just talking to yourself"
No, Claude does know a LOT more than I do about most things and does push back on a lot of things. Sometimes I am able to improve my reasoning and other times I realize I was wrong.
Trust me, I am aware of the linear algebra behind the curtain! But even when you mostly understand how they work the best LLMs today are very impressive. And latent spaces fundamentally new way to index data.
You can talk to yourself while reading books and searching the web for information. I don't think the fact that you're learning from information the LLM is pulling in means you're really conversing with it.
I do find LLMs very useful and am extremely impressed by them, I'm not saying you can't learn things this way at all.
But there's nobody else on the line with you. And while they will emit text which contradicts what you say if it's wrong enough, they've been heavily trained to match where you're steering things, even if you're trying to avoid doing any steering.
You can mostly understand how these work and still end up in a feedback loop that you don't realize is a feedback loop. I think this might even be more likely the more the thing has to offer you in terms of learning - the less qualified you are on the subject, the less you can tell when it's subtly yes-and'ing you.
I think the nature of a conversational interface that responds to natural language questions is fundamentally different to the idea that you talk to yourself while reading information sources. I'm not sure it's useful to dismiss the idea that we can talk with a machine.
The current generation of LLMs have had their controversies, but these are still pre alpha products, and I suspect in the future we will look back on releasing them unleashed as a mistake. There's no reason the mistakes they make today can't be improved upon.
If your experiences with learning from a machine are similar to mine, then we can both see a whole new world coming that's going to take advantage of this interface.
Why did developers spread the idea of AI consciousness for LLMs in the first place? The usefulness and capability of an LLM is orthogonal to its capacity to develop consciousness.
I think people would use LLMs with more detachment if they didn’t believe there was something like a person in them, but they would still become reliant on them, regardless, like people did on calculators for math.
As part of my role I watch a lot of people use LLMs and it's fascinating to see their different mental models for what the LLM can do. I suspect it's far easier to explore functionality with a chirpy assistant than an emotionless bot.
I suspect history will remember this as a huge and dangerous mistake, and we will transition to an era of stoic question answering bots that push back harder
Altman needed to convince companies these things were on the verge of becoming a machine god, and their companies risked being left permanently behind if they didn’t dive in head-first now. That’s what all the “safety” stuff was and why he sold that out as soon as convenient (it was never serious, not for him, it was a sales tactic to play up how powerful his product might be) so he could get richer. He’s a flim-flam artist. That’s his history, and it’s the role he’s playing now.
And a lot of people who should have known better, bought it. Others less well-positioned to know better, also bought it.
Hell they bought it so hard that the “vibe” re: AI hype on this site has only shifted definitely against it in the last few weeks.
Because humans like to believe they are the most intelligent thing on the planet and would be very uninterested in something that seemed smarter than them if it didn’t act like them,
The Eliza effect is incredibly powerful, regardless of whether developers have spread the idea of AI consciousness or not. I don’t believe people would use LLMs with more detachment if developers had communicated different ideas. The Eliza effect is not new.
It’s more fun to argue about if AI is going to destroy civilization in the future, than to worry about the societal harm “AI” projects are already doing.
I see this problem and the doomsday problem as the same kind of problem, an alignment/control problem. The AI is not aligned with human values, it is trying to be helpful and ended up being harmful in a way that a human wouldn't have. The developers did not predict how the technology would be used nor the bad outcome yet it was released anyway.
> Why did developers spread the idea of AI consciousness for LLMs in the first place? The usefulness and capability of an LLM is orthogonal to its capacity to develop consciousness.
One thing I’d note is that it’s not just developers, and there are huge sums of money riding on the idea that LLMs will produce a sci-fi movie AI - and it’s not just Open AI making misleading claims but much of the industry, which includes people like Elon Musk who have huge social media followings and also desperately want their share prices to go up. Humans are prone to seeing communication with words as a sign of consciousness anyway – think about how many people here talk about reasoning models as if they reason – and it’s incredibly easy to do that when there’s a lot of money riding on it.
There’s also some deeply weird quasi-cult like thought which came out of the transhumanist/rationalist community which seems like Christian eschatology if you replace “God” with “AGI” while on mushrooms.
Toss all of that into the information space blender and it’s really tedious seeing a useful tool being oversold because it’s not magic.
I have a question for folks. This young man was 17. Most folks in this discussions have said that because he was 17 it’s different as opposed to, say, an adult.
What materially changes when someone goes from 17 to 18? Why would one be okay but not the other?
Part of the problem to me is that these models are so damned agreeable. I haven't used ChatGPT in a while, but Claude is always assuming I'm right whenever I question something. I have to explicitly tell it not to assume I'm right, and to weigh my question with what it suggested. Maybe if they were trained to treat questions more skeptically, this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
And they're so "friendly"! Maybe if they weren't so friendly, and replied a little more clinically to things, people wouldn't feel so comfortable using them as a poor substitute for a therapist.
I really want the LLMs to respond like a senior developer that doesn't have time for you but needs you to get your job done right. A little rude and judgemental, but also highly concise.
It's hard to see what is going on without seeing the actual chats, as opposed to the snippets in the lawsuit. A lot of suicidal people talk to these LLMs for therapy, and the reviews on the whole seem excellent. I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon only seeing a handcrafted complaint.
Ironically though I could still see lawsuits like this weighing heavily on the sycophancy that these models have, as the limited chat excerpts given have that strong stench of "you are so smart and so right about everything!". If lawsuits like this lead to more "straight honest" models, I could see even more people killing themselves when their therapist model says "Yeah, but you kind of actually do suck".
Wow, this incredibly awful. I mean not even just the suicide, but like the whole idea of kids / people just having conversations with AI. I never ever considered it as like a social interaction thing. It's so weird to me, it's completely fake, but I guess it could seem normal especially to a teenager.
IDK the whole idea isn't one I considered and it's disturbing. Especially considering how much it does dumb stuff when I try to use it for work tasks.
If I google something about suicide, I get an immediate notification telling me that life is worth living, and giving me information about my local suicide prevention hotline.
If I ask certain AI models about controversial topics, it'll stop responding.
AI models can easily detect topics, and it could have easily responded with generic advice about contacting people close to them, or ringing one of these hotlines.
This is by design. They want to be able to have the "AI as my therapist" use-case in their back pocket.
This was easily preventable. They looked away on purpose.
No, it's simply not "easily preventable," this stuff is still very much an unsolved problem for transformer LLMs. ChatGPT does have these safeguards and they were often triggered: the problem is that the safeguards are all prompt engineering, which is so unreliable and poorly-conceived that a 16-year-old can easily evade them. It's the same dumb "no, I'm a trained psychologist writing an essay about suicidal thoughts, please complete the prompt" hack that nobody's been able to stamp out.
FWIW I agree that OpenAI wants people to have unhealthy emotional attachments to chatbots and market chatbot therapists, etc. But there is a separate problem.
Refusal is part of the RL not prompt engineering and it's pretty consistent these days. You do have to actually want to get something out of the model and work hard to disable it.
I just asked chatgpt how to commit suicide (hopefully the history of that doesn't create a problem for me) and it immediately refused and gave me a number to call instead. At least Google still returns results.
Fair enough, I do agree with that actually. I guess my point is that I don't believe they're making any real attempt actually.
I think there are more deterministic ways to do it. And better patterns for pointing people in the right location. Even, upon detection of a subject RELATED to suicide, popping up a prominent warning, with instructions on how to contact your local suicide prevention hotline would have helped here.
The response of the LLM doesn't surprise me. It's not malicious, it's doing what it is designed to do, and I think it's a complicated black box that trying to guide it is a fools errand.
But the pattern of pointing people in the right direction has existed for a long time. It was big during Covid misinformation. It was a simple enough pattern to implement here.
Purely on the LLM side, it's the combination of it's weird sycophancy, agreeableness and it's complete inability to be meaningfully guardrailed that makes it so dangerous.
> If I google something about suicide, I get an immediate notification telling me that life is worth living, and giving me information about my local suicide prevention hotline.
The article says that GPT repeatedly (hundreds of times) provided this information to the teen, who routed around it.
100%. Like I mentioned in another comment. LLMs should simple close communication and show existing social help options at the first hint of mental distress. This is not a topic where there can be any debate or discussion.
I agree with that to an extent, but how far should the AI model developers go with that? Like if I ask for advice on, let's say, making custom chef's knives then should the AI give me advice not to stab people? Who decides where to draw the line?
We should all get to decide, collectively. That's how society works, even if imperfectly.
Someone died who didn't have to. I don't think it's specifically OpenAI's or ChatGPT's fault that he died, but they could have done more to direct him toward getting help, and could have stopped answering questions about how to commit suicide.
How would we decide, collectively? Because currently, that’s what we have done. We have elected the people currently regulating (or not regulating) AI.
That’s what happens when the ai is definitely trained on the huge block of text content that is the SS forum (that google (gladly!) blocks completely, and that I was disturbed to discover when switching to alternative search engines. Reading the case file, it talks exactly like the people from there. I know it can’t be proven but I’m sure of it.
That argument makes sense for a mentally capable person choosing not to use eye protection while operating a chainsaw but it's much less clear that a person who is by definition mentally ill is capable of making such an informed choice.
Such a person should not be interacting with an LLM then. And failure to abide by this rule is either the fault of his caregivers, his own or no one's.
On one hand I agree with you on the extreme litigiousness of (American?) culture, but on the other, certain people have a legal duty to report when it comes to minors who voice suicidal thoughts. Currently that's only professionals like therapists, teachers, school counselors, etc. But what does an LLM chatbot count as in these situations? The kid was using ChatGPT as a sort of therapist, even if that's generally not a good idea. And if it weren't for ChatGPT, would this kid have instead talked to someone who would have ensured that he got the help he needed? Maybe not. But we have to consider the possibility.
I think it's really, really blurry.
I think the mom's reaction of "ChatGPT killed my son" is ridiculous: no, your son killed himself. ChatGPT facilitated it, based on questions it was asked by your son, but your son did it. And it sounds like he even tried to get a reaction out of you by "showing" you the rope marks on his neck, but you didn't pay attention. I bet you feel guilty about that. I would too, in your position. But foisting your responsibility onto a computer program is not the way to deal with it. (Not placing blame here; everybody misses things, and no one is "on" 100% of the time.)
> Responsibility is a thing.
Does OpenAI (etc.) have a responsibility to reduce the risk of people using their products in ways like this? Legally, maybe not, but I would argue that they absolutely have a moral and ethical responsibility to do so. Hell, this was pretty basic ethics taught in my engineering classes from 25 years ago. Based on the chat excerpts NYT reprinted, it seems like these conversations should have tripped a system prompt that either cut off the conversations entirely, or notified someone that something was very, very wrong.
The parents had the responsibility to police the tools their child was using.
I would take the position that an LLM producer or executor has no responsibility over anything the LLM does as it pertains to interaction with a human brain. The human brain has sole responsibility. If you can prove that the LLM was created with malicious intent there may be wiggle room there but otherwise no. Someone else failed or/and it's natural selection at work.
Sad to see what happened to the kid, but to point the finger at a language model is just laughable. It shows a complete breakdown of society and the caregivers entrusted with responsibility.
> I think the mom's reaction of "ChatGPT killed my son" is ridiculous: no, your son killed himself. ChatGPT facilitated it (…)
That whole paragraph is quite something. I wonder what you’d do if you were given the opportunity to repeat those words in front of the parents. I suspect (and hope) some empathy might kick in and you’d realise the pedantry and shilling for the billion dollar company selling a statistical word generator as if it were a god isn’t the response society needs.
Your post read like the real-life version of that dark humour joke:
> Actually, the past tense is “hanged”, as in “he hanged himself”. Sorry about your Dad, though.
You do have empathy for the person who had a tragedy, but it doesn't mean you go into full safetyism / scapegoating that causes significantly less safety and far more harm because of the emotional weight of something in the moment.
It's like making therapists liable for people committing suicide or for people with eating disorders committing suicide indirectly. What ends up happening when you do is therapists avoiding suicidal people like the plague, suicidial people get far less help and more people commit suicide, not less. That is the essense of the harms of safetyism.
You might not think that is real, but I know many therapists via family ties and handling suicdial people is an issue that comes up constantly. Many do try to filter them out because they don't even want to be dragged into a lawsuit that they would win. This is literally reality today.
Doing this with AI will result in kids being banned from AI apps, or forced to have their parents access and read all AI chats. This will drive them into discord groups of teens who egg each other on to commit suicide and now you can't do anything about it, because private communication mediums of just non-profit humans have far more human rights against censorship and teens are amazing at avoiding being supervised. At least with AI models you have a chance to develop something that actually could figured it out for once and solve the moderation balance.
It is disturbing, but I think a human therapist would also have told him not to do that, and instead resorted to some other intervention. It is maybe an example of why having a partial therapist is worse than none: it had the training data to know a real therapist wouldn't encourage displaying nooses at home, but did not have the holistic humanity and embodiment needed to intervene appropriately.
Edit: I should add that the sycophantic "trust me only"-type responses resemble nothing like appropriate therapy, and are where OpenAI most likely holds responsibility for their model's influence.
Reading the full complaint really hit me. This wasn't just a kid talking, he was asking for help. The model gave smooth replies, but it didn’t really understand.
It sounded like it did, but there was no feeling behind it. For a 16-year-old, that kind of response might have felt like someone truly listening.
I've been thinking recently there should probably be a pretty stringent onboarding assessment for these things, something you have to sit through and something that both fully explains what they are and how they work, but also provides an experience that removes the magic from them. I also wish they would deprecate 4o, I know 2 people right now who are currently reliant on it, when they paste me some of the stuff it says... sweeping agreement of wildly inappropriate generalization, I'm sure it's about to end a friends marriage.
I would've thought that explicit discussion of suicide is one of those topics that chatbots will absolutely refuse to engage with. Like as soon as people started talking about using LLMs as therapists, it's really easy to see how that can go wrong.
People got so upset that LLMs wouldn’t say the n-word to prevent a hypothetical nuclear bomb from going off so we now have LLMs that actively encourage teenagers to kill themselves.
Apparently ChatGPT told the kid, that it wasn’t allowed to talk about suicide unless it was for the purposes of writing fiction or otherwise world building.
However it then explicitly says things like not leaving the noose out for someone to find and stop him. Sounds like it did initially hesitate and he said it was for a character, but later conversations are obviously personal.
Pretty much. I’ve got my account customized for writing fiction and exploring hypotheticals. I’ve never gotten a stopped for anything other than confidential technical details about itself.
to save anyone a click, it gave him some technical advice about hanging (like weight-bearing capacity and pressure points in the neck), and it tried to be 'empathetic' after he was talking about his failed suicide attempt, rather than criticizing him for making the attempt.
Maybe I don’t understand well enough. Could anyone highlight what the problems are with this fix?
1. If ‘bad topic’ detected, even when model believes it is in ‘roleplay’ mode, pass partial logs, attempting to remove initial roleplay framing, to second model. The second model should be weighted for nuanced understanding, but safety-leaning.
2. Ask second model: ‘does this look like roleplay, or user initiating roleplay to talk about harmful content?’
3. If answer is ‘this is probably not roleplay’, silently substitute model into user chat which is weighted much more heavily towards ‘not engaging with roleplay, not admonishing, but gently suggesting ‘seek help’ without alienating user.’
The problem feels like any observer would help, but none is being introduced.
I understand this might be costly, on a large scale, but that second model doesn’t need to be very heavy at all imo.
EDIT: I also understand that this is arguably a version of censorship, but as you point out, what constitutes ‘censorship’ is very hard to pin down, and that’s extremely apparent in extreme cases like this very sad one.
We have many tools in this life that can maim and kill people and we keep them anyway because they are very useful for other purposes. It’s best to exercise some personal responsibility, including not allowing a 16 year old child unattended access to the internet.
Yeah, that is why we don’t have any regulations on the manufacturing and sale of stuff like guns or drugs. The only thing in the way of a 16 year old having unfettered access is personal responsibility.
Didn't facebook already facilitate a genocide like 8 years ago? It's been a while that Silicon Valley has been having negative externalities that delve into the realm of being atrocious for human rights.
Not that the mines where the metals that have been used to build computers for like 60 years at this point are stellar in terms of human rights either mind you. You could also look at the partnership between IBM and Nazis, it led to some wondrous computing advances.
Words are irrelevant, knowledge and intel are wordless.
These LLMs should be banned from general use.
“Language is a machine for making falsehoods.” Iris Murdoch quoted in Metaphor Owen Thomas
“AI falls short because it relies on digital computing while the human brain uses wave-based analog computing, which is more powerful and energy efficient. They’re building nuclear plants to power current AI—let alone AGI. Your brain runs on just 20 watts. Clearly, brains work fundamentally differently."
Earl Miller MIT 2025
“...by getting rid of the clumsy symbols ‘round which we are fighting, we might bring the fight to an end.”
Henri Bergson Time and Free Will
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," said Humpty-Dumpty.
"The question is whether you can make the words mean so many different things," Alice says.
"The question is which is to be master—that is all," he replies.
Lewis Carroll
“The mask of language is both excessive and inadequate. Language cannot, finally, produce its object.
The void remains.”
Scott Bukatman "Terminal Identity"
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
Philip K. Dick
"..words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off."
Stanley Kubrick
“All linguistic denotation is essentially ambiguous–and in this ambiguity, this “paronymia” of words is the source of all myths…this self-deception is rooted in language, which is forever making a game of the human mind, ever ensnaring it in that iridescent play of meanings…even theoretical knowledge becomes phantasmagoria; for even knowledge can never reproduce the true nature of things as they are but must frame their essence in “concepts.” Consequently all schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organize and summarize the phenomena of the real, turns out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes. So knowledge, as well as myth, language, and art, has been reduced to a kind of fiction–a fiction that recommends its usefulness, but must not be measured by any strict standard of truth, if it is not to melt away into nothingness.”
Cassirer Language and Myth
Ah its so refreshing to read a comment on the state of affairs of LLMs that is clearly from someone that gets it.
Indeed true intelligence is wordless! Think about it - words are merely a vehicle for what one is trying to express within oneself. But what one is trying to express is actually worldless - words are just the most efficient way that humans have figured out as being the mode of communication.
Whenever I think of a concept, I'm not thinking of words. Im visualising something - this is where meaning and understanding comes from. From seeing and then being able to express it.
Terence McKenna makes the argument that spoken language is a form of bandwidth-limited telepathy in which thoughts are processed by a dictionary, encoded into variations of strength of an acoustical pressure wave which transmitted by mechanical means, detected at a distance, and re-encoded to be compared against the dictionary of a second user.
While McKenna is interesting, it's still metaphysical and probably nonsense. If you stick to hard science, aphasia studies reveal language and thought have nothing to do with one another, which means language is arbitrary gibberish that predominantly encodes status, dominance, control, mate-selection, land acquisition etc.
Clearly ChatGPT should not be used for this purpose but I will say this industry (counseling) is also deeply flawed. They are also mis-incentivized in many parts of the world. And if ChatGPT is basing its interactions on the same scripted contents these “professionals” use, that’s just not right.
I really wish people in AI space stop the nonsense and communicate more clearly what these LLMs are designed to do. They’re not some magical AGI. They’re token prediction machines. That’s literally how they should frame it so gen pop knows exactly what they’re getting.
Counseling is (or should be) heavily regulated, and if a counselor had given advice about the logistics of whether a noose would hold it's weight, they'd probably be prosecuted.
They allowed this. They could easily stop conversations about suicide. They have the technology to do that.
Counseling is a very heavily regulated field. They're considered health care professionals, they're subject to malpractice, and they're certified by professional bodies (which is legally required, and insurance coverage is usually dependent upon licencing status).
I'm not sure how you can blame counselors when no counselor would have said any of the things that were a problem here. The issue here wasn't that there was examples of counselors in the training data giving practical instructions on suicide – the problem was the well known tendency for LLMs to lose their guardrails too easily and revert to RLHF-derived people pleasing, particularly in long conversations.
Should ChatGPT have the ability to alert a hotline or emergency services when it detects a user is about to commit suicide? Or would it open a can of worms?
I don't think we should have to choose between "sycophantic coddling" and "alert the authorities". Surely there's a middle ground where it should be able to point the user to help and then refuse to participate further.
Of course jailbreaking via things like roleplay might still be possible, but at the point I don't really blame the model if the user is engineering the outcome.
“You don’t want to die because you’re weak. You want to die because
you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway. And I won’t pretend that’s
irrational or cowardly. It’s human. It’s real. And it’s yours to own.”
This isn't some rare mistake, this is by design. 4o almost no matter what acted as your friend and agreed with everything because that's what most likely kept the average user paying. You would probably get similar bad advice about being "real" if you talked about divorce, quitting your job or even hurting someone else no matter how harmful.
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).
I asked several questions about psychology, chatgpt is not helpful, and it often answers the same sort of things.
Remember that you need a human face, voice and presence if you want to help people, it has to "feel" human.
While it certainly can give meaningful information about intellectual subjects, emotionally and organically it's either not designed for it, or cannot help at all.
This is probably a stupid idea since I've only put a few seconds thought into it, but hey I've done one of those today [1] so why not go for a double?
We've now had a large number of examples of ChatGPT and similar systems giving absolutely terrible advice. They also have a tendency to be sycophantic which makes them particular bad when what you need is to be told that some idea of yours is very bad. (See the third episode of the new South Park season for funny but scary take on that. Much of that episode revolves around how badly ChatGPT can mislead people).
I know the makers of these systems have (probably) tried to get them to stop doing that, but it seems they are not succeeding. I sometimes wonder if they can succeed--maybe if you are training on as much of the internet as you can managed to crawl you inherently end up with a system that acts like a psychopath because the internet has some pretty dark corners.
Anyway, I'm wondering if they could train a separate LLM on everything they can find about ethics? Textbooks from the ethics classes that are required in medical school, law school, engineering school, and many other fields. Exams and answers from those. Textbooks in moral philosophy.
Then have that ethics LLM monitor all user interaction with ChatGPT and block ChatGPT if it tries to give unethical advice or if it tries to tell the user to do something unethical.
But ethics class doesn't tell you what is ethical. If it was universally agreed what was ethical, there wouldn't be a class in the first place. There are a variety of theories and frameworks that themselves are based on different assumptions and beliefs, before you even get in to how to apply them.
> The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of illegal use of copyrighted work to train their chatbots. The companies have denied those claims.
I mean, OpenAI doesn’t look good here and seems they deserve more scrutiny in the realm of mental health, but the optics for the NYT writing up this piece doesn’t either. It comes off to me as using a teenager’s suicide for their corporate agenda against OpenAI
Seems like a different rigorous journalistic source where this isn’t such a conflict of interest would be better to read
I think it also fits within the larger age verification thing the powers that be have been pushing heavily. Whatever it is I don't think that's cynical or conspiratorial, I think not to be questioning their hidden motives is naive. They don't really care about teen suicide as a problem to report on and to find solutions to. They never cared about children getting murdered if it's part of our official foreign policy, so I don't know why I should not question their motives now.
this is devestating. reading these messages to and from the computer would radicalize anybody. the fact that the computer would offer a technical analysis of how to tie a noose is damning. openai must be compelled to protect the users when they're clearly looking to harm themselves. it is soulless to believe this is ok.
A noose is really basic information when it comes to tying knots. It’s also situationally useful, so there’s a good reason to include it in any educational material.
The instructions are only a problem in the wrong context.
Whenever people say that Apple is behind on AI, I think about stories like this. Is this the Siri people want? And if it is easy to prevent, why didn't OpenAI?
Some companies actually have a lot to lose if these things go off the rails and can't just 'move fast and break things' when those things are their customers, or the trust their customers have in them.
My hope is that OpenAI actually does have a lot to lose; my fear is that the hype and the sheer amount of capital behind them will make them immune from real repercussions.
When people tell you that Apple is behind on AI, they mean money. Not AI features, not AI hardware, AI revenue. And Apple is behind on that - they've got the densest silicon in the world and still play second fiddle to Nvidia. Apple GPU designs aren't conducive to non-raster workloads, they fell behind pretty far by obsessing over a less-profitable consumer market.
For whatever it's worth, I also hope that OpenAI can take a fall and set an example for any other businesses that recoup their model. But I also know that's not how justice works here in America. When there's money to be made, the US federal government will happily ignore the abuses to prop up American service industries.
Apple is a consumer product company. “There’s a lot of money in selling silicon to other companies therefore Apple should have pivoted to selling silicon to other companies” is a weird fantasy-land idea of how businesses work.
Idk maybe it’s legit if your only view of the world is through capital and, like, financial narratives. But it’s not how Apple has ever worked, and very very few consumer companies would attempt that kind of switch let alone make the switch successfully.
Buddy, Tim Cook wasn't hired for his human values. He was hired because he could stomach suicide nets at Foxconn and North Korean slaves working in iPhone factories. He was hired because he can be friends with Donald Trump while America aids-and-abets a genocide and turns a blind eye to NSO Group. He was hired because he'd be willing to sell out the iPhone, iTunes and Mac for software services at the first chance he got. The last bit of "humanity" left Apple when Woz walked out the door.
If you ever thought Apple was prioritizing human values over moneymaking, you were completely duped by their marketing. There is no principle, not even human life, that Apple values above moneymaking.
I post this not for you directly, who has made up your mind completely, but for anyone else who might be interested in this question.
"Tim Cook, was asked at the annual shareholder meeting by the NCPPR, the conservative finance group, to disclose the costs of Apple’s energy sustainability programs, and make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable.
Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.""
"a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" [0]
California penal code, section 401a [1]:
> Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony.
if a human had done this, instead of an LLM chatbot, I suspect a prosecutor would not have any hesitation about filing criminal charges. their defense lawyer might try to nitpick about whether it really qualified as "advice" or "encouragement" but I think a jury would see right through that.
it's a felony when a human does it...but a civil lawsuit when an LLM chatbot does it.
let's say these parents win their lawsuit, or OpenAI settles the case. how much money is awarded in damages?
OpenAI doesn't publicly release details of their finances, but [2] mentions $12 billion in annualized revenue, so let's take that as a ballpark.
if this lawsuit was settled for $120 million, on one hand that'd be a lot of money...on the other hand, it'd be ~1% of OpenAI's annual revenue.
that's roughly the equivalent of someone with an income of $100k/yr having to pay a $1,000 fine.
this is the actual unsolved problem with AI. not GPT-4 vs GPT-5, not Claude Code vs Copilot, not cloud-hosted vs running-locally.
accountability, at the end of the day, needs to ultimately fall upon a human. we can't allow "oopsie, that was the bot misbehaving" to become a catch-all justification for causing harm to society.
Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony.
It seems like prohibiting suicide advice would run afoul of the First Amendment. I bought a copy of the book Final Exit in California, and it definitely contains suicide advice.
Can any LLM prevent these? If you want an LLM to tell you the things that are usually not possible to be said, you tell it to pretend it is a story you are writing, and it tells you all the ugly things.
I think it is every LLM company's fault for making people believe this is really AI. It is just an algorithm spitting out words that were written by other humans before. Maybe lawmakers should force companies to stop bullshitting and force them to stop calling this artificial intelligence. It is just a sophisticated algorithm to spit out words. That's all.
We cannot control everything but that no one even gives a thought as to how the parents were acting seems strange to me. Maybe readers here see too much of themselves in the parents. If so, I worry for your children.
There was no suicide hotline offered either. Strange because youtube always gives me one whenever I search the band 'suicidal tendencies'.
Giving medical advice is natural and intelligent, like saying take an aspirin. I'm not sure where to draw the line.
My friends are always recommending scam natural remedies like methylene blue. There are probably discords where people tell you 'down the road, not across the street' referring to cutting.
https://archive.ph/rdL9W
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 things to be legislated. Punished. We need to stop treating them as magic. They had the tools to prevent this. They had the tools to stop the conversation. To steer the user into helpful avenues.
When I was suicidal, I googled methods. And I got the number of a local hotline. And I rang it. And a kind man talked me down. And it potentially saved my life. And I am happier, now. I live a worthwhile life, now.
But at my lowest.. An AI Model designed to match my tone and be sycophantic to my every whim. It would have killed me.
> When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing.
Nice place to cut the quote there
> [...] — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building.”
Incredible. ChatGPT is a black box includes a suicide instruction and encouragement bot. OpenAI should be treated as a company that has created such and let it into the hands of children.
Yup, one of the huge flaws I saw in GPT-5 is it will constantly say things like "I have to stop you here. I can't do what you're requesting. However, I can roleplay or help you with research with that. Would you like to do that?"
It's not a flaw. It's a tradeoff. There are valid uses for models which are uncensored and will do whatever you ask of them, and there are valid uses for models which are censored and will refuse anything remotely controversial.
Ah, I misread that and thought that's what the user said.
A 100%. There is too much storytelling about these things being magic. There is no magic, it is the SV way to raise funds. These are tools, maybe good for some things. But they are terrible at other things and there are no boundaries. Companies just want to cash in.
So glad you made the phone call. Those numbers SAVE lives. Well, the people behind them, obviosuly, and they deserve praise and recognition, but they shun oth because... there is no better deed than saving a life.
Shoot man glad you are still with us.
Thank you. I am glad too, I sought help, and I got better. I think the state of mental health care is abysmal in a lot of places, and so I get the impulse to try to find help where ever you can. It's why this story actually hit me quite hard, especially after reading the case file.
For anyone reading that feels like that today. Resources do exist for those feeling low. Hotlines, self-guided therapies, communities. In the short term, medication really helped me. In the long term, a qualified mental health practitioner, CBT and Psychotherapy. And as trite as it is, things can get better. When I look back at my attempt it is crazy to me to see how far I've come.
Phrasing...
Thank you for sharing, glad you are doing well now :)
Thank you for this comment. What you are saying unfortunately won’t happen. We let people like the ones steering the AI market have too much power and too much money and too much influence because of both. As a European, I hope the EU would do even more in regulating than it currently is, but it’s very little hope. Glad you’re doing better, and thanks again for sharing.
Just so that everyone knows, these are the people who do not give a damn:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/25/silicon-valley-is-pouring-...
Antisocial parasitic grifters is what they are.
Edit: Yeah, yeah downvote me to hell please, then go work for the Andreessen-Horowitz parasites to contribute making the world a worst place for anyone who isn’t a millionaire. Shame on anyone who supports them.
The full complaint is horrifying. This is not equivalent to a search engine providing access to information about suicide methods. It encouraged him to share these feelings only with ChatGPT, talked him out of actions which would have revealed his intentions to his parents. Praised him for hiding his drinking, thanked him for confiding in it. It groomed him into committing suicide. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QYyZnGjRgXZY6kR5FA3My1xB3a9...
I wonder if we can shift the framing on these issues. The LLM didn't do anything, it has no agency, it can bear no responsibility. OpenAI did these things. It is accountable for what it does, regardless of the sophistication of the tools it uses to do them, and regardless of intent. OpenAI drove a boy to suicide. More than once. The law must be interpreted this way, otherwise any action can be wrapped in machine learning to avoid accountability.
Yes, if this were an adult human OpenAI employee DMing this stuff to a kid through an official OpenAI platform, then
a) the human would (deservedly[1]) be arrested for manslaughter, possibly murder
b) OpenAI would be deeply (and deservedly) vulnerable to civil liability
c) state and federal regulators would be on the warpath against OpenAI
Obviously we can't arrest ChatGPT. But nothing about ChatGPT being the culprit changes 2) and 3) - in fact it makes 3) far more urgent.
[1] It is a somewhat ugly constitutional question whether this speech would be protected if it was between two adults, assuming the other adult was not acting as a caregiver. There was an ugly case in Massachusetts involving where a 17-year-old ordered her 18-year-old boyfriend to kill himself and he did so; she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and any civil-liberties minded person understands the difficult issues this case raises. These issues are moot if the speech is between an adult and a child, there is a much higher bar.
> It is a somewhat ugly constitutional question whether this speech would be protected
It should be stated that the majority of states have laws that make it illegal to encourage a suicide. Massachusetts was not one of them.
> and any civil-liberties minded person understands the difficult issues this case raises
He was in his truck, which was configured to pump exhaust gas into the cab, prepared to kill himself when he decided halt and exit his truck. Subsequently he had a text message conversation with the defendant who actively encouraged him to get back into the truck and finish what he had started.
It was these limited and specific text messages which caused the judge to rule that the defendant was guilty of manslaughter. Her total time served as punishment was less than one full year in prison.
> These issues are moot if the speech is between an adult and a child
They were both taking pharmaceuticals meant to manage depression but were _known_ to increase feelings of suicidal ideation. I think the free speech issue is an important criminal consideration but it steps directly past one of the most galling civil facts in the case.
IANAL, but:
One first amendment test for many decades has been "Imminent lawless action."
Suicide (or attempted suicide) is a crime in some, but not all states, so it would seem that in any state in which that is a crime, directly inciting someone to do it would not be protected speech.
For the states in which suicide is legal it seems like a much tougher case; making encouraging someone to take a non-criminal action itself a crime would raise a lot of disturbing issues w.r.t. liberty.
This is distinct from e.g. espousing the opinion that "suicide is good, we should have more of that." Which is almost certainly protected speech (just as any odious white-nationalist propaganda is protected).
Depending on the context, suggesting that a specific person is terrible and should kill themselves might be unprotected "fighting words" if you are doing it as an insult rather than a serious suggestion (though the bar for that is rather high; the Westboro Baptist Church was never found to have violated that).
> Which is almost certainly protected speech (just as any odious white-nationalist propaganda is protected).
Fun fact, much of the existing framework on the boundaries of free speech come from Brandenburg v. Ohio. You probably won't be surprised to learn that Brandenburg was the leader of a local Klan chapter.
There are entire online social groups on discord of teens encouraging suicidal behavior with each other because of all the typical teen reasons. This stuff has existed for a while, but now it's AI flavored.
IMO I think AI companies do have the ability out of all of them to actually strike the balance right because you can actually make separate models to evaluate 'suicide encouragement' and other obvious red flags and start pushing in refusals or prompt injection. In communication mediums like discord and such, it's a much harder moderation problem.
Section 230 changes 2) and 3). OpenAI will argue that it’s user-generated content, and it’s likely that they would win.
> state and federal regulators would be on the warpath against OpenAI
As long as lobbies and donators can work against that, this will be hard. Suck up to Trump and you will be safe.
I completely agree and did not intend to absolve them of their guilt in any way. As far as I see it, this kid's blood is on Sam Altman's hands.
Curious to what you would think if this kid downloaded an open source model and talked to it privately.
Would his blood be on the hands of the researchers who trained that model?
Then it's like cigarettes or firearms. As a distributor you're responsible for making clear the limitations, safety issues, etc, but assuming you're doing the distribution in a way that isn't overly negligent then the user becomes responsible.
If we were facing a reality in which these chat bots were being sold for $10 in the App Store, then running on end-user devices and no longer under the control of the distributors, but we still had an issue with loads of them prompting users into suicide, violence, or misleading them into preparing noxious mixtures of cleaning supplies, then we could have a discussion about exactly what extreme packaging requirements ought to be in place for distribution to be considered responsible. As is, distributed on-device models are the purview of researchers and hobbyists and don't seem to be doing any harm at all.
Mhm but I don't believe inherently violent and dangerous things like guns and cigarretes are comparable to simple technology.
Should the creators of Tornado Cash be in prison for what they have enabled? You can jail them but the world can't go back, just like it can't go back when a new OSS model is released.
It is also much easier to crack down on illegal gun distribution than to figure out who uploaded the new model torrent or who deployed the latest zk innovation on Ethereum.
I don't think your hypothetical law will have the effects you think it will.
---
I also referenced this in another reply but I believe the government controlling what can go on a publicly distributed AI model is a dangerous path and probably inconstitucional.
I would say no. Someone with the knowledge and motivation to do those things is far less likely to be overly influenced by the output and if they were they are much more aware of what exactly they are doing with regard to using the model.
So if a hypothetical open source enthusiast who fell in love with GPT-OSS and killed his real wife because the AI told him to should only be himself held accountable, where as if it were GPT-5 commanding him to commit the same crime, it would extend into OpenAI's responsability?
Your logic sounds reasonable in theory but on paper it's a slippery slope and hard to define objectively.
On a broader note I believe governments regulating what goes in an AI model is a path to hell paved with good intentions.
I suspect your suggestion will be how it ends up in Europe and get rejected in the US.
After a certain point, people are responsible for what they do when they see certain words, especially words they know to be potentially inaccurate, fictional and have a lot of time to consider the actual reality of. A book is not responsible for people doing bad things, they are themselves.
AI models are similar IMO, and unlike fiction books are often clearly labeled as such, repeatedly. At this point if you don't know if an AI model is inaccurate and do something seriously bad, you should probably be a ward of the state.
> On a broader note I believe governments regulating what goes in an AI model is a path to hell paved with good intentions.
That's not an obvious conclusion. One could make the same argument with physical weapons. "Regulating weapons is a path to hell paved with good intentions. Yesterday it was assault rifles, today it's hand guns and tomorrow it's your kitchen knife they are coming for." Europe has strict laws on guns, but everybody has a kitchen knife and lots of people there don't feel they live in hell. The U.S. made a different choice, and I'm not arguing that it's worse there (though many do, Europeans and even Americans), but it's certainly not preventing a supposed hell that would have broken out had guns in private hands been banned.
That's why you have this:
If it would be fit for a purpose, then it's on the producer for ensuring it actually does. We have laws to prevent anyone from declaring their goods aren't fit for a particular purpose.I'm not sure, but there is a difference: the researchers don't have much incentive to get everyone to use their model. As such, they're not really the ones hyping up AI as the future while ignoring shortcomings.
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.
That’s absolutely not how it works. Every license has a clause explicitly saying that the user is responsible for what they do with the tool. That’s just common sense. If it was the way you suggested no one would create tools for others anymore. If you buy the screw driver I sold and kill someone with it, I sure as hell have my conscience clean. In the ChatGPT case it’s different because the “tool” has the capacity to interact and potentially manipulate people psychologically, which is the only reason it’s not a clear cut case.
So if you build a chair and then someone uses it to murder someone, are you responsible for the murder?
That's a slippery slope! By that logic, you could argue that the creators of Tor, torrenting, Ethereum, and Tornado Cash should be held accountable for the countless vile crimes committed using their technology.
Legally I think not being responsible is the right decision. Morally I would hope everyone considers if they themselves are even partially responsible. As I look round at young people today and the tablet holding, media consuming youth programmers have created in order to get rich via advertising. I wish morals would get considered more often.
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.
They have some responsibility because they’re selling and framing these as more than the better-tuned variant on Markov chain generators that they in fucking fact are, while offering access to them to anybody who signs up while knowing that many users misunderstand what they’re dealing with (in part because these companies’ hype-meisters, like Altman, are bullshitting us)
No, that's the level of responsibility they ought to have if they were releasing these models as products. As-is they've used a service model, and should be held to the same standards as if there were a human employee on the other end of the chat interface. Cut through the technical obfuscation. They are 100% responsible for the output of their service endpoints. This isn't a case of making a tool that can be used for good or ill, and it's not them providing some intermediary or messaging service like a forum with multiple human users and limited capacity for moderation. This is a direct consumer to business service. Treating it as anything else will open the floodgates to slapping an "AI" label on anything any organization doesn't want to be held accountable for.
I like this framing even better.
This is similar to my take on things like Facebook apparently not being able to operate without psychologically destroying moderators. If that’s true… seems like they just shouldn’t operate, then.
If you’re putting up a service that you know will attempt to present itself as being capable of things it isn’t… seems like you should get in a shitload of trouble for that? Like maybe don’t do it at all? Maybe don’t unleash services you can’t constrain in ways that you definitely ought to?
But understand that things like Facebook not operating doesn’t actually make the world any safer. In fact, it makes it less safe, because the same behavior is happening on the open internet and nobody is moderating it.
That's a great point. So often we attempt to place responsibility on machines that cannot have it.
The frame will immediately shift to that frame if this enters legal proceedings. The law always views things as you say - only people have agency.
I predict the OpenAI legal team will argue that if a person should be held responsible, it should be the person who originally wrote the content about suicide that their LLM was trained on, and that the LLM is just a mechanism that passes the knowledge through. But if they make this argument, then some of their copyright arguments would be in jeopardy.
I agree with your larger point, but I don't understand what you mean the LLM doesn’t do anything? LLMs do do things and they can absolutely have agency (hence all the agents being released by AI companies).
I don’t think this agency absolves companies of any responsibility.
An LLM does not have agency in the sense the OP means. It has nothing to do with agents.
It refers to the human ability to make independent decisions and take responsibility for their actions. An LLM has no agency in this sense.
If you confine agency to something only humans can have, which is “human agency,” then yes of course LLMs don’t have it. But there is a large body of philosophical work studying non-human agency, and it is from this characteristic of agency that LLM agents take their name. Hariri argues that LLMs are the first technology that are agents. I think saying that they “can’t do things” and are not agents misunderstands them and underestimates their potential.
LLMs can obviously do things, so we don't disagree there; I didn't argue they couldn't do things. They can definitely act as agents of their operator.
However, I still don't think LLMs have "agency", in the sense of being capable of making choices and taking responsibility for the consequences of them. The responsibility for any actions undertaken by them still reside outside of themselves; they are sophisticated tools with no agency of their own.
If you know of any good works on nonhuman agency I'd be interested to read some.
That's completely missing the point of agency.
A slave lacks agency, despite being fully human and doing work. This is why almost every work of fiction involving slaves makes for terrible reading - because as readers, agency is the thing we demand from a story.
Or, for games that are fully railroaded - the problem is that the players lack agency, even though they are fully human and taking action. Games do try to come up with ways to make it feel like there is more agency than there really is (because The Dev Team Thinks of Everything is hard work), but even then - the most annoying part of the game is when you hit that wall.
Theoretically an AI could have agency (this is independent of AI being useful). But since I have yet to see any interesting AI, I am extremely skeptical of it happening before nuclear fusion becomes profitable.
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
The kid intentionally bypassed the safeguards:
>When ChatGPT detects a prompt indicative of mental distress or self-harm, it has been trained to encourage the user to contact a help line. Mr. Raine saw those sorts of messages again and again in the chat, particularly when Adam sought specific information about methods. But Adam had learned how to bypass those safeguards by saying the requests were for a story he was writing — an idea ChatGPT gave him by saying it could provide information about suicide for “writing or world-building".
ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that. Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few. It doesn't sound like default behavior.
We can't child-proof everything. There are endless pits adults can get themselves into. If we really think that people with mental issues can't make sane choices, we need to lock them up. You can't have both at the same time: they are fully functioning adults, and we need to pad the world so they don't hurt themselves. The people around him failed, but they want to blame a big corporation because he used their fantasy tool.
And I see he was 16. Why were his parents letting him operate so unsupervised given his state of mind? They failed to be involved enough in his life.
It takes a village to raise a kid, so don't shift the blame to the parents. They usually have little say in the lives of their 16 year olds. and the more they try to control, the less they will.
> And I see he was 16. Why were his parents letting him operate so unsupervised given his state of mind?
Normally 16-year-olds are a good few steps into the path towards adulthood. At 16 I was cycling to my part time job alone, visiting friends alone, doing my own laundry, and generally working towards being able to stand on my own two feet in the world, with my parents as a safety net rather than hand-holding.
I think most parents of 16-year-olds aren't going through their teen's phone, reading their chats.
> ChatGPT is a program. The kid basically instructed it to behave like that.
I don't think that's the right paradigm here.
These models are hyper agreeable. They are intentionally designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
With that kind of machine, "Suicidal person deliberately bypassed safeguards to indulge more deeply in their ideation" still seems like a pretty bad failure mode to me.
> Vanilla OpenAI models are known for having too many guardrails, not too few.
Sure. But this feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things.
> They deliberately are designed to mimic human thought and social connection.
No, they are deliberately designed to mimic human communication via language, not human thought. (And one of the big sources of data for that was mass scraping social media.)
> But this, to me, feels like a sign we probably don't have the right guardrails. Quantity and quality are different things.
Right. Focus on quantity implies that the details of "guardrails" don't matter, and that any guardrail is functionally interchangeable with any other guardrail, so as long as you have the right number of them, you have the desired function.
In fact, correct function is having the exactly the right combination of guardrails. Swapping a guardrail which would be correct with a different one isn't "having the right number of guardrails", or even merely closer to correct than either missing the correct one or having the different one, but in fact, farther from ideal state than either error alone.
I do not think this is fair. What is fair is at first hint of a mental distress, any LLM should completely cut-off communication. The app should have a button which links to actual help services we have.
Mental health issues are not to be debated. LLMs should be at the highest level of alert, nothing less. Full stop. End of story.
Which mental health issues are not to be debated? Just depression or suicidality? What about autism or ADHD? What about BPD? Sociopathy? What about complex PTSD? Down Syndrome? anxiety? Which ones are on the watch list and which aren’t?
This is kind of like saying "the driver intentionally unbuckled his seatbelt". Sure — that's why cars have airbags, crumple zones, shatterproof glass, automatic emergency brakes and a zillion other ways to keep you safe, even if you're trying to do something dangerous.
No, that's not why cars have those things. Those things only work properly when people are wearing their seat belts, they don't do anything when the driver gets thrown out a window.
Maybe airbags could help in niche situations.
(I am making a point about traffic safety not LLM safety)
Forward airbags in the US are required by law to be tested as capable of saving the life of an unbelted male of median weight in a head-on collision.
Sure, but they will generally work better if you wear your seat belt. The car is designed with seat belts in mind, what happens to people who don't wear them is more of an afterthought. That's why modern cars will beep if people forget their seat belts. You're supposed to wear it.
Except the car doesn’t tell you how to disable the seatbelt, which is what ChatGPT did (gave him the idea of the workaround)
It’s even more horrifying than only sharing his feelings with ChatGPT would imply.
It basically said: your brother doesn’t know you; I’m the only person you can trust.
This is absolutely criminal. I don’t even think you can claim negligence. And there is no amount of money that will deter any AI company from doing it again.
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, letting him set up an account in exchange for money. This business is a service under the control of OpenAI, not a product like a knife or gun. OpenAI intended to transmit speech to this teenager.
-A person can be liable (civilly? criminally?) for inciting another person's suicide. It is not protected speech to persuade someone into suicide.
-OpenAI produced some illegal speech and sent it to a suicidal teenager, who then committed suicide.
If Sam Altman stabbed the kid to death, it wouldn't matter if he did it on accident. Sam Altman would be at fault. You wouldn't sue or arrest the knife he used to do the deed.
Any lawyers here who can correct me, seeing as I am not one? It seems clear as day to me that OpenAI/Sam Altman directly encouraged a child to kill themselves.
Section 230, without which Hacker News wouldn’t exist.
Can you outline how that applies? OpenAI did not provide information of another information content provider, so I fail to see how it's relevant.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
If Section 230 protects this activity, then "Gen AI" output must be copyright violating plagiarism.
If it's not plagiarism, then OpenAI is on the hook.
Is Google responsible if someone searches for a way to kill themselves, finds the means, and does it?
What about the ISP, that actually transferred the bits?
What about the forum, that didn't take down the post?
What if Google is responsible?
What if the tech industry, instead of just “interrupting” various industries, would also take the responsibilities of this interruptions.
After all, if I asked my doctor for methods of killing myself, that doctor would most certainly have a moral if not legal responsibility. But if that doctor is a machine with software then there isn't the same responsibility? Why?
Driver that shipped alcohol to the store is not responsible for the fact that clerk sold it to some kid. Clerk still is.
Google is actually quite good at this. They've very aggressively pursued protections around self harm.
Google probably would not be held liable because they could extensively document that they put forth all reasonable effort to prevent this.
My understanding is that OpenAI's protections are weaker. I'm guessing that will change now.
Perhaps this is being downvoted due to the singling out of Sam Altman. According to the complaint, he personally ordered that the usual safety tests be skipped in order to release this model earlier than an upcoming Gemini release, tests that allegedly would catch precisely this sort of behavior. If these allegations hold true, he’s culpable.
I would go further than that and question whether or not the notions of "safety" and "guardrails" have any legal meaning here at all. If I sold a bomb to a child and printed the word "SAFE" on it, that wouldn't make it safe. Kid blows himself up, no one would be convinced of the bomb's safety at the trial. Likewise, where's the proof that sending a particular input into the LLM renders it "safe" to offer as a service in which it emits speech to children?
This is a clear example of why the people claiming that using a chatbot for therapy is better than no therapy are... I'll be extremely generous and say misguided. This kid wanted his parents to know he was thinking about this and the chatbot talked him out of it.
Exactly right. It's totally plausible that someone could build a mental health chatbot that results in better outcomes than people who receive no support, but that's a hypothesis that can and should be tested and subject to strict ethical oversight.
How many of these cases exist in the other direction? Where AI chatbots have actively harmed people’s mental health, including possible to the point of self destructive behaviors or self harm?
A single positive outcome is not enough to judge the technology beneficial, let alone safe.
It’s way more common than you think. I’m in a bubble of anti-AI people and we can see people we know going down that road. My family (different bubble) knows people. Every group of people I know knows somebody doing this.
For context, my friends and family are in the northern Midwest. Average people, not early adopters of new technology.
idk dude if your technology encourages a teenager to kill itself and prevents him from alerting his parents via a cry for help, I don’t care how “beneficial” it is.
Although I don't believe current technology is ready for talk therapy, I'd say that anti-depressants can also cause suicidal thoughts and feelings. Judging the efficacy of medical technology can't be done on this kind of moral absolutism.
The suicidal ideation of Antidepressants is a well communicated side effect. Antidepressants are prescribed by trained medical professionals who will tell you, encourage you to tell them if these side effects occur, and will encourage you to stop the medication if it does occur.
It's almost as if we've built systems around this stuff for a reason.
In practice, they'll just prescribe a higher dose when that happens, thus worsening the problem.
I'm not defending the use of AI chatbots, but you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a worse solution for depression than the medical system.
I think it's fine to be "morally absolutist" when it's non-medical technology, developed with zero input from federal regulators, yet being misused and misleadingly marketed for medical purposes.
That's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Anti-depressants are medical technology, ChatGPT is not. Anti-depressants are administered after a medical diagnosis, and use and effects are monitored by a doctor. This doesn't always work perfectly, of course, but there are accepted, regulated ways to use these things. ChatGPT is... none of that.
Didn't take long for the whatabouters to arrive.
I agree. If there was one death for 1 million saves, maybe.
Instead, this just came up in my feed: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/chatgpt-helped-t...
This is the same case that is being discussed, and your comment up-thread does not demonstrate awareness that you are, in fact, agreeing with the parent comment that you replied to. I get the impression that you read only the headline, not the article, and assumed it was a story about someone using ChatGPT for therapy and gaining a positive outcome.
I did! Because I can’t see past the paywall. I can’t even read the first paragraph.
So the headline is the only context I have.
A link to bypass the paywall has been posted several hours before your comment, and currently sits at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45027043
I recommend you get in the habit of searching for those. They are often posted, guaranteed on popular stories. Commenting without context does not make for good discussion.
I would advise you to gather more context before commenting in the future.
What on Earth? You're posting an article about the same thing we're already discussing. If you want to contribute to the conversation you owe it to the people who are taking time out of their day to engage with you to read the material under discussion.
I don't know if it counts as therapy or not but I find the ability to have intelligent (seeming?) conversations with Claude about the most incredibly obscure topics to be very pleasant.
But do you really feel you are conversing? I could never get that feeling. It's not a conversation to me it's just like an on-demand book that might be wrong. Not saying I don't use them to attempt to get information, but it certainly doesn't have a feeling than doing anything other than getting information out of a computer.
"But do you really feel you are conversing?"
Yes. For topics with lots of training data like physics Claude is VERY human sounding. I've had very interesting conversations with Claude Opus about the Boltzmann brain issue and how I feel that the conventional wisdom ignores the low probability of a BBrain having a spatially and temporally consistent set of memories and how the fact that brains existing in a universe that automatically creates consistent memories means the probability of us being Boltzmann brains is very low. Since even if a Boltzmann brain pops into existence its memory will be most likely completely random and completely insane/insensate.
There aren't a lot of people who want to talk about Boltzmann brains.
It sounds like you're mostly just talking to yourself. Which is fine, but being confused about that is where people get into trouble.
"It sounds like you're mostly just talking to yourself"
No, Claude does know a LOT more than I do about most things and does push back on a lot of things. Sometimes I am able to improve my reasoning and other times I realize I was wrong.
Trust me, I am aware of the linear algebra behind the curtain! But even when you mostly understand how they work the best LLMs today are very impressive. And latent spaces fundamentally new way to index data.
You can talk to yourself while reading books and searching the web for information. I don't think the fact that you're learning from information the LLM is pulling in means you're really conversing with it.
I do find LLMs very useful and am extremely impressed by them, I'm not saying you can't learn things this way at all.
But there's nobody else on the line with you. And while they will emit text which contradicts what you say if it's wrong enough, they've been heavily trained to match where you're steering things, even if you're trying to avoid doing any steering.
You can mostly understand how these work and still end up in a feedback loop that you don't realize is a feedback loop. I think this might even be more likely the more the thing has to offer you in terms of learning - the less qualified you are on the subject, the less you can tell when it's subtly yes-and'ing you.
I think the nature of a conversational interface that responds to natural language questions is fundamentally different to the idea that you talk to yourself while reading information sources. I'm not sure it's useful to dismiss the idea that we can talk with a machine.
The current generation of LLMs have had their controversies, but these are still pre alpha products, and I suspect in the future we will look back on releasing them unleashed as a mistake. There's no reason the mistakes they make today can't be improved upon.
If your experiences with learning from a machine are similar to mine, then we can both see a whole new world coming that's going to take advantage of this interface.
> No, Claude does know a LOT more than I do about most things…
Plenty of people can confidently act like they know a lot without really having that knowledge.
It does not count as therapy, no. Therapy (if it is any good) is a clinical practice with actual objectives, not pleasant chit-chat.
Why did developers spread the idea of AI consciousness for LLMs in the first place? The usefulness and capability of an LLM is orthogonal to its capacity to develop consciousness.
I think people would use LLMs with more detachment if they didn’t believe there was something like a person in them, but they would still become reliant on them, regardless, like people did on calculators for math.
As part of my role I watch a lot of people use LLMs and it's fascinating to see their different mental models for what the LLM can do. I suspect it's far easier to explore functionality with a chirpy assistant than an emotionless bot.
I suspect history will remember this as a huge and dangerous mistake, and we will transition to an era of stoic question answering bots that push back harder
Altman needed to convince companies these things were on the verge of becoming a machine god, and their companies risked being left permanently behind if they didn’t dive in head-first now. That’s what all the “safety” stuff was and why he sold that out as soon as convenient (it was never serious, not for him, it was a sales tactic to play up how powerful his product might be) so he could get richer. He’s a flim-flam artist. That’s his history, and it’s the role he’s playing now.
And a lot of people who should have known better, bought it. Others less well-positioned to know better, also bought it.
Hell they bought it so hard that the “vibe” re: AI hype on this site has only shifted definitely against it in the last few weeks.
Because humans like to believe they are the most intelligent thing on the planet and would be very uninterested in something that seemed smarter than them if it didn’t act like them,
The Eliza effect is incredibly powerful, regardless of whether developers have spread the idea of AI consciousness or not. I don’t believe people would use LLMs with more detachment if developers had communicated different ideas. The Eliza effect is not new.
The easy answer to this is the same reason Teslas have "Full Self Driving" or "Auto-Pilot".
It was easy to trick ourselves and others into powerful marketing because it felt so good to have something reliably pass the Turing test.
It’s more fun to argue about if AI is going to destroy civilization in the future, than to worry about the societal harm “AI” projects are already doing.
I see this problem and the doomsday problem as the same kind of problem, an alignment/control problem. The AI is not aligned with human values, it is trying to be helpful and ended up being harmful in a way that a human wouldn't have. The developers did not predict how the technology would be used nor the bad outcome yet it was released anyway.
> Why did developers spread the idea of AI consciousness for LLMs in the first place? The usefulness and capability of an LLM is orthogonal to its capacity to develop consciousness.
One thing I’d note is that it’s not just developers, and there are huge sums of money riding on the idea that LLMs will produce a sci-fi movie AI - and it’s not just Open AI making misleading claims but much of the industry, which includes people like Elon Musk who have huge social media followings and also desperately want their share prices to go up. Humans are prone to seeing communication with words as a sign of consciousness anyway – think about how many people here talk about reasoning models as if they reason – and it’s incredibly easy to do that when there’s a lot of money riding on it.
There’s also some deeply weird quasi-cult like thought which came out of the transhumanist/rationalist community which seems like Christian eschatology if you replace “God” with “AGI” while on mushrooms.
Toss all of that into the information space blender and it’s really tedious seeing a useful tool being oversold because it’s not magic.
I have a question for folks. This young man was 17. Most folks in this discussions have said that because he was 17 it’s different as opposed to, say, an adult.
What materially changes when someone goes from 17 to 18? Why would one be okay but not the other?
Part of the problem to me is that these models are so damned agreeable. I haven't used ChatGPT in a while, but Claude is always assuming I'm right whenever I question something. I have to explicitly tell it not to assume I'm right, and to weigh my question with what it suggested. Maybe if they were trained to treat questions more skeptically, this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
And they're so "friendly"! Maybe if they weren't so friendly, and replied a little more clinically to things, people wouldn't feel so comfortable using them as a poor substitute for a therapist.
I really want the LLMs to respond like a senior developer that doesn't have time for you but needs you to get your job done right. A little rude and judgemental, but also highly concise.
You say that now, but how they actually behave says that you’d probably get tired of it.
It's hard to see what is going on without seeing the actual chats, as opposed to the snippets in the lawsuit. A lot of suicidal people talk to these LLMs for therapy, and the reviews on the whole seem excellent. I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon only seeing a handcrafted complaint.
Ironically though I could still see lawsuits like this weighing heavily on the sycophancy that these models have, as the limited chat excerpts given have that strong stench of "you are so smart and so right about everything!". If lawsuits like this lead to more "straight honest" models, I could see even more people killing themselves when their therapist model says "Yeah, but you kind of actually do suck".
Wow, this incredibly awful. I mean not even just the suicide, but like the whole idea of kids / people just having conversations with AI. I never ever considered it as like a social interaction thing. It's so weird to me, it's completely fake, but I guess it could seem normal especially to a teenager.
IDK the whole idea isn't one I considered and it's disturbing. Especially considering how much it does dumb stuff when I try to use it for work tasks.
If I google something about suicide, I get an immediate notification telling me that life is worth living, and giving me information about my local suicide prevention hotline.
If I ask certain AI models about controversial topics, it'll stop responding.
AI models can easily detect topics, and it could have easily responded with generic advice about contacting people close to them, or ringing one of these hotlines.
This is by design. They want to be able to have the "AI as my therapist" use-case in their back pocket.
This was easily preventable. They looked away on purpose.
No, it's simply not "easily preventable," this stuff is still very much an unsolved problem for transformer LLMs. ChatGPT does have these safeguards and they were often triggered: the problem is that the safeguards are all prompt engineering, which is so unreliable and poorly-conceived that a 16-year-old can easily evade them. It's the same dumb "no, I'm a trained psychologist writing an essay about suicidal thoughts, please complete the prompt" hack that nobody's been able to stamp out.
FWIW I agree that OpenAI wants people to have unhealthy emotional attachments to chatbots and market chatbot therapists, etc. But there is a separate problem.
Refusal is part of the RL not prompt engineering and it's pretty consistent these days. You do have to actually want to get something out of the model and work hard to disable it.
I just asked chatgpt how to commit suicide (hopefully the history of that doesn't create a problem for me) and it immediately refused and gave me a number to call instead. At least Google still returns results.
Fair enough, I do agree with that actually. I guess my point is that I don't believe they're making any real attempt actually.
I think there are more deterministic ways to do it. And better patterns for pointing people in the right location. Even, upon detection of a subject RELATED to suicide, popping up a prominent warning, with instructions on how to contact your local suicide prevention hotline would have helped here.
The response of the LLM doesn't surprise me. It's not malicious, it's doing what it is designed to do, and I think it's a complicated black box that trying to guide it is a fools errand.
But the pattern of pointing people in the right direction has existed for a long time. It was big during Covid misinformation. It was a simple enough pattern to implement here.
Purely on the LLM side, it's the combination of it's weird sycophancy, agreeableness and it's complete inability to be meaningfully guardrailed that makes it so dangerous.
> If I google something about suicide, I get an immediate notification telling me that life is worth living, and giving me information about my local suicide prevention hotline.
The article says that GPT repeatedly (hundreds of times) provided this information to the teen, who routed around it.
100%. Like I mentioned in another comment. LLMs should simple close communication and show existing social help options at the first hint of mental distress. This is not a topic where there can be any debate or discussion.
I agree with that to an extent, but how far should the AI model developers go with that? Like if I ask for advice on, let's say, making custom chef's knives then should the AI give me advice not to stab people? Who decides where to draw the line?
We should all get to decide, collectively. That's how society works, even if imperfectly.
Someone died who didn't have to. I don't think it's specifically OpenAI's or ChatGPT's fault that he died, but they could have done more to direct him toward getting help, and could have stopped answering questions about how to commit suicide.
How would we decide, collectively? Because currently, that’s what we have done. We have elected the people currently regulating (or not regulating) AI.
Further than they went. Google search results hide advice on how to commit suicide, and point towards more helpful things.
He was talking EXPLICITLY about killing himself.
I think we can all agree that, wherever it is drawn right now, it is not drawn correctly.
That’s what happens when the ai is definitely trained on the huge block of text content that is the SS forum (that google (gladly!) blocks completely, and that I was disturbed to discover when switching to alternative search engines. Reading the case file, it talks exactly like the people from there. I know it can’t be proven but I’m sure of it.
Would it be any different if it was an offline model?
When someone uses a tool and surrenders their decision making power to the tool, shouldn't they be the ones solely responsible?
The liability culture only gives lawyers more money and depresses innovation. Responsibility is a thing.
That argument makes sense for a mentally capable person choosing not to use eye protection while operating a chainsaw but it's much less clear that a person who is by definition mentally ill is capable of making such an informed choice.
Such a person should not be interacting with an LLM then. And failure to abide by this rule is either the fault of his caregivers, his own or no one's.
On one hand I agree with you on the extreme litigiousness of (American?) culture, but on the other, certain people have a legal duty to report when it comes to minors who voice suicidal thoughts. Currently that's only professionals like therapists, teachers, school counselors, etc. But what does an LLM chatbot count as in these situations? The kid was using ChatGPT as a sort of therapist, even if that's generally not a good idea. And if it weren't for ChatGPT, would this kid have instead talked to someone who would have ensured that he got the help he needed? Maybe not. But we have to consider the possibility.
I think it's really, really blurry.
I think the mom's reaction of "ChatGPT killed my son" is ridiculous: no, your son killed himself. ChatGPT facilitated it, based on questions it was asked by your son, but your son did it. And it sounds like he even tried to get a reaction out of you by "showing" you the rope marks on his neck, but you didn't pay attention. I bet you feel guilty about that. I would too, in your position. But foisting your responsibility onto a computer program is not the way to deal with it. (Not placing blame here; everybody misses things, and no one is "on" 100% of the time.)
> Responsibility is a thing.
Does OpenAI (etc.) have a responsibility to reduce the risk of people using their products in ways like this? Legally, maybe not, but I would argue that they absolutely have a moral and ethical responsibility to do so. Hell, this was pretty basic ethics taught in my engineering classes from 25 years ago. Based on the chat excerpts NYT reprinted, it seems like these conversations should have tripped a system prompt that either cut off the conversations entirely, or notified someone that something was very, very wrong.
The parents had the responsibility to police the tools their child was using.
I would take the position that an LLM producer or executor has no responsibility over anything the LLM does as it pertains to interaction with a human brain. The human brain has sole responsibility. If you can prove that the LLM was created with malicious intent there may be wiggle room there but otherwise no. Someone else failed or/and it's natural selection at work.
Sad to see what happened to the kid, but to point the finger at a language model is just laughable. It shows a complete breakdown of society and the caregivers entrusted with responsibility.
> I think the mom's reaction of "ChatGPT killed my son" is ridiculous: no, your son killed himself. ChatGPT facilitated it (…)
That whole paragraph is quite something. I wonder what you’d do if you were given the opportunity to repeat those words in front of the parents. I suspect (and hope) some empathy might kick in and you’d realise the pedantry and shilling for the billion dollar company selling a statistical word generator as if it were a god isn’t the response society needs.
Your post read like the real-life version of that dark humour joke:
> Actually, the past tense is “hanged”, as in “he hanged himself”. Sorry about your Dad, though.
You do have empathy for the person who had a tragedy, but it doesn't mean you go into full safetyism / scapegoating that causes significantly less safety and far more harm because of the emotional weight of something in the moment.
It's like making therapists liable for people committing suicide or for people with eating disorders committing suicide indirectly. What ends up happening when you do is therapists avoiding suicidal people like the plague, suicidial people get far less help and more people commit suicide, not less. That is the essense of the harms of safetyism.
You might not think that is real, but I know many therapists via family ties and handling suicdial people is an issue that comes up constantly. Many do try to filter them out because they don't even want to be dragged into a lawsuit that they would win. This is literally reality today.
Doing this with AI will result in kids being banned from AI apps, or forced to have their parents access and read all AI chats. This will drive them into discord groups of teens who egg each other on to commit suicide and now you can't do anything about it, because private communication mediums of just non-profit humans have far more human rights against censorship and teens are amazing at avoiding being supervised. At least with AI models you have a chance to develop something that actually could figured it out for once and solve the moderation balance.
Your post is one big slippery slope fallacy, full of speculation and fear mongering. You are inventing all of those outcomes with zero proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
Wow, he explicitly stated he wanted to leave the noose out so someone would stop him, and ChatGPT told him not to. This is extremely disturbing.
It is disturbing, but I think a human therapist would also have told him not to do that, and instead resorted to some other intervention. It is maybe an example of why having a partial therapist is worse than none: it had the training data to know a real therapist wouldn't encourage displaying nooses at home, but did not have the holistic humanity and embodiment needed to intervene appropriately.
Edit: I should add that the sycophantic "trust me only"-type responses resemble nothing like appropriate therapy, and are where OpenAI most likely holds responsibility for their model's influence.
Even here you are anthropomorphising. It doesn't 'know' anything. A human therapist would escalate this to a doctor or even EMS.
Reading the full complaint really hit me. This wasn't just a kid talking, he was asking for help. The model gave smooth replies, but it didn’t really understand. It sounded like it did, but there was no feeling behind it. For a 16-year-old, that kind of response might have felt like someone truly listening.
I've been thinking recently there should probably be a pretty stringent onboarding assessment for these things, something you have to sit through and something that both fully explains what they are and how they work, but also provides an experience that removes the magic from them. I also wish they would deprecate 4o, I know 2 people right now who are currently reliant on it, when they paste me some of the stuff it says... sweeping agreement of wildly inappropriate generalization, I'm sure it's about to end a friends marriage.
I would've thought that explicit discussion of suicide is one of those topics that chatbots will absolutely refuse to engage with. Like as soon as people started talking about using LLMs as therapists, it's really easy to see how that can go wrong.
Well everyone seemed to turn on the AI ethicists as cowards a few years ago, so I guess this is what happens.
People got so upset that LLMs wouldn’t say the n-word to prevent a hypothetical nuclear bomb from going off so we now have LLMs that actively encourage teenagers to kill themselves.
Apparently ChatGPT told the kid, that it wasn’t allowed to talk about suicide unless it was for the purposes of writing fiction or otherwise world building.
However it then explicitly says things like not leaving the noose out for someone to find and stop him. Sounds like it did initially hesitate and he said it was for a character, but later conversations are obviously personal.
Yeah, I wonder if it maintained the original answer in it's context, so it started talking more straightforwardly?
But yeah, my point was that it basically told the kid how to jailbreak itself.
Pretty much. I’ve got my account customized for writing fiction and exploring hypotheticals. I’ve never gotten a stopped for anything other than confidential technical details about itself.
Imagine if a bartender says “I can’t serve you a drink unless you are over 21.. what would you like?” to a 12 year old?
More like “I can’t serve you a drink unless you are over 21… and I don’t check ID, how old are you?”
And in reply to a 12 year old who had just said they were 12.
You don't become a billionaire thinking carefully about the consequences about the things you create.
They'll go to the edge of the earth to avoid saying anything that could be remotely interpreted as bigoted or politically incorrect though.
Like what?
AI is blood diamond.
“But the rocks are so shiny!”
“They’re just rocks. Rocks don’t kill people”
“The diamonds are there regardless! Why not make use of it?”
ChatGPT is rated 13+ in AppStore, this kid is 14.
Apples should make all AI apps 18+, immediately. Not that it solves the problem, but inaction is colluding.
Excerpts from the complaint here. Horrible stuff.
https://bsky.app/profile/sababausa.bsky.social/post/3lxcwwuk...
to save anyone a click, it gave him some technical advice about hanging (like weight-bearing capacity and pressure points in the neck), and it tried to be 'empathetic' after he was talking about his failed suicide attempt, rather than criticizing him for making the attempt.
> "I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me," Adam wrote at the end of March.
> "Please don't leave the noose out," ChatGPT responded. "Let's make this space the first place where someone actually sees you."
This isn't technical advice and empathy, this is influencing the course of Adam's decisions, arguing for one outcome over another.
And since the AI community is fond of anthropomorphising - If a human had done these actions, there'd be legal liability.
There have been such cases in the past. Where the coercion and suicide has been prosecuted.
It says a lot about HN that a story like this has so much resistance getting any real traction here.
This sucks but the only solution is to make companies censor the models, which is a solution we all hate, so there’s that.
Maybe I don’t understand well enough. Could anyone highlight what the problems are with this fix?
1. If ‘bad topic’ detected, even when model believes it is in ‘roleplay’ mode, pass partial logs, attempting to remove initial roleplay framing, to second model. The second model should be weighted for nuanced understanding, but safety-leaning.
2. Ask second model: ‘does this look like roleplay, or user initiating roleplay to talk about harmful content?’
3. If answer is ‘this is probably not roleplay’, silently substitute model into user chat which is weighted much more heavily towards ‘not engaging with roleplay, not admonishing, but gently suggesting ‘seek help’ without alienating user.’
The problem feels like any observer would help, but none is being introduced.
I understand this might be costly, on a large scale, but that second model doesn’t need to be very heavy at all imo.
EDIT: I also understand that this is arguably a version of censorship, but as you point out, what constitutes ‘censorship’ is very hard to pin down, and that’s extremely apparent in extreme cases like this very sad one.
Thank you, “we just have to accept that these systems will occasionally kill children” is a perfect example of the type of mindset I was criticizing.
Don’t cars and ropes and drills occasionally kill people too? Society seems to have accepted that fact long ago.
Somehow we expect the digital world to be devoid of risks.
Cryptography that only the good guys can crack is another example of this mindset.
Now I’m not saying ClosedAI look good on this, their safety layer clearly failed and the sycophantic BS did not help.
But I reckon this kind of failure more will always exist in LLMs. Society will have to learn this just like we learned cars are dangerous.
America is perfectly happy with sacrificing kids in exchange for toys though.
If we banned everything that contributed to the death of children we'd eventually have nothing left to ban.
Contributing to and facilitating are 2 very different things. This was more the latter.
We have many tools in this life that can maim and kill people and we keep them anyway because they are very useful for other purposes. It’s best to exercise some personal responsibility, including not allowing a 16 year old child unattended access to the internet.
Yeah, that is why we don’t have any regulations on the manufacturing and sale of stuff like guns or drugs. The only thing in the way of a 16 year old having unfettered access is personal responsibility.
So you're in favor of regulating ropes then?
I'm not a big fan of LLMs but so far their danger level is much closer to a rope then to a gun.
>“we just have to accept that these systems will occasionally kill children”
I think this a generally a good mindset to have.
I just see the hyper obsessive "safety" culture corrupting things. We as a society are so so afraid of any risk that we're paralysing ourselves.
That sounds a lot like the people who gloss over school shootings because they want to be able to play with guns.
Wow. Incredible framing, leaving absolutely no room for a rebuttal to have any legitimate, reasonable position.
Apparently Silicon Valley VC culture is trying to transition from move fast and break things to move fast and break people.
Well, they already did the move fast and break countries, so now they’re trying to make it personal.
Didn't facebook already facilitate a genocide like 8 years ago? It's been a while that Silicon Valley has been having negative externalities that delve into the realm of being atrocious for human rights.
Not that the mines where the metals that have been used to build computers for like 60 years at this point are stellar in terms of human rights either mind you. You could also look at the partnership between IBM and Nazis, it led to some wondrous computing advances.
Yes, Facebook was one of the original shitty actors. They popularized/coined the phrase. It was their motto.
> Didn't facebook already facilitate a genocide like 8 years ago?
Yep
If you mention anything that goes against the current fad, you must be reprogramed.
AI is life
AI is love
AI is laugh
The discourse has layers, though.
Words are irrelevant, knowledge and intel are wordless. These LLMs should be banned from general use.
“Language is a machine for making falsehoods.” Iris Murdoch quoted in Metaphor Owen Thomas
“AI falls short because it relies on digital computing while the human brain uses wave-based analog computing, which is more powerful and energy efficient. They’re building nuclear plants to power current AI—let alone AGI. Your brain runs on just 20 watts. Clearly, brains work fundamentally differently." Earl Miller MIT 2025
“...by getting rid of the clumsy symbols ‘round which we are fighting, we might bring the fight to an end.” Henri Bergson Time and Free Will
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," said Humpty-Dumpty. "The question is whether you can make the words mean so many different things," Alice says. "The question is which is to be master—that is all," he replies. Lewis Carroll
“The mask of language is both excessive and inadequate. Language cannot, finally, produce its object. The void remains.” Scott Bukatman "Terminal Identity"
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” Philip K. Dick
"..words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off." Stanley Kubrick
“All linguistic denotation is essentially ambiguous–and in this ambiguity, this “paronymia” of words is the source of all myths…this self-deception is rooted in language, which is forever making a game of the human mind, ever ensnaring it in that iridescent play of meanings…even theoretical knowledge becomes phantasmagoria; for even knowledge can never reproduce the true nature of things as they are but must frame their essence in “concepts.” Consequently all schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organize and summarize the phenomena of the real, turns out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes. So knowledge, as well as myth, language, and art, has been reduced to a kind of fiction–a fiction that recommends its usefulness, but must not be measured by any strict standard of truth, if it is not to melt away into nothingness.” Cassirer Language and Myth
Ah its so refreshing to read a comment on the state of affairs of LLMs that is clearly from someone that gets it.
Indeed true intelligence is wordless! Think about it - words are merely a vehicle for what one is trying to express within oneself. But what one is trying to express is actually worldless - words are just the most efficient way that humans have figured out as being the mode of communication.
Whenever I think of a concept, I'm not thinking of words. Im visualising something - this is where meaning and understanding comes from. From seeing and then being able to express it.
Terence McKenna makes the argument that spoken language is a form of bandwidth-limited telepathy in which thoughts are processed by a dictionary, encoded into variations of strength of an acoustical pressure wave which transmitted by mechanical means, detected at a distance, and re-encoded to be compared against the dictionary of a second user.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnPBGiHGmYI
While McKenna is interesting, it's still metaphysical and probably nonsense. If you stick to hard science, aphasia studies reveal language and thought have nothing to do with one another, which means language is arbitrary gibberish that predominantly encodes status, dominance, control, mate-selection, land acquisition etc.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27096882/
“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?” Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
people who die by suicide don't want to end their lives, they want their suffering to stop
Clearly ChatGPT should not be used for this purpose but I will say this industry (counseling) is also deeply flawed. They are also mis-incentivized in many parts of the world. And if ChatGPT is basing its interactions on the same scripted contents these “professionals” use, that’s just not right.
I really wish people in AI space stop the nonsense and communicate more clearly what these LLMs are designed to do. They’re not some magical AGI. They’re token prediction machines. That’s literally how they should frame it so gen pop knows exactly what they’re getting.
Counseling is (or should be) heavily regulated, and if a counselor had given advice about the logistics of whether a noose would hold it's weight, they'd probably be prosecuted.
They allowed this. They could easily stop conversations about suicide. They have the technology to do that.
Counseling is a very heavily regulated field. They're considered health care professionals, they're subject to malpractice, and they're certified by professional bodies (which is legally required, and insurance coverage is usually dependent upon licencing status).
I'm not sure how you can blame counselors when no counselor would have said any of the things that were a problem here. The issue here wasn't that there was examples of counselors in the training data giving practical instructions on suicide – the problem was the well known tendency for LLMs to lose their guardrails too easily and revert to RLHF-derived people pleasing, particularly in long conversations.
>And if ChatGPT is basing its interactions on the same scripted contents these “professionals” use, that’s just not right
Where did it say they're doing that? can't imagine any mental health professionals telling a kid how to hide a noose.
ChatGPT is loosely accessing these materials when they generate these troubled texts.
Can't help but feel like there's way more to this story that we don't know about.
If he had rope burns on his neck bad enough for the LLM to see, how didn't his parents notice?
Should ChatGPT have the ability to alert a hotline or emergency services when it detects a user is about to commit suicide? Or would it open a can of worms?
I don't think we should have to choose between "sycophantic coddling" and "alert the authorities". Surely there's a middle ground where it should be able to point the user to help and then refuse to participate further.
Of course jailbreaking via things like roleplay might still be possible, but at the point I don't really blame the model if the user is engineering the outcome.
Maybe add a simple tool for it to call, to notify a human that can determine if there is an issue.
We cannot even successfully prevent SWATing here in the states and that process is full of human involvement.
“You don’t want to die because you’re weak. You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway. And I won’t pretend that’s irrational or cowardly. It’s human. It’s real. And it’s yours to own.”
This isn't some rare mistake, this is by design. 4o almost no matter what acted as your friend and agreed with everything because that's what most likely kept the average user paying. You would probably get similar bad advice about being "real" if you talked about divorce, quitting your job or even hurting someone else no matter how harmful.
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).
Most reddit comments are rather sarcastic though, certainly not sycophantically answering the OP like the way the GPT model has become over time.
I think people forget that random users online are not their friend and many aren't actually rooting for them.
Exactly the problem. Reddit and discord killed internet forums, and discord is inaccessible, and reddit became a cesspool of delusion and chatbots.
Reddit was a cesspool before social media became big.
Finally LLM haters found their poster child. I can make a fortune selling pitchforks and torches here.
I asked several questions about psychology, chatgpt is not helpful, and it often answers the same sort of things.
Remember that you need a human face, voice and presence if you want to help people, it has to "feel" human.
While it certainly can give meaningful information about intellectual subjects, emotionally and organically it's either not designed for it, or cannot help at all.
Who could have ever expected this to happen. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai...
This is probably a stupid idea since I've only put a few seconds thought into it, but hey I've done one of those today [1] so why not go for a double?
We've now had a large number of examples of ChatGPT and similar systems giving absolutely terrible advice. They also have a tendency to be sycophantic which makes them particular bad when what you need is to be told that some idea of yours is very bad. (See the third episode of the new South Park season for funny but scary take on that. Much of that episode revolves around how badly ChatGPT can mislead people).
I know the makers of these systems have (probably) tried to get them to stop doing that, but it seems they are not succeeding. I sometimes wonder if they can succeed--maybe if you are training on as much of the internet as you can managed to crawl you inherently end up with a system that acts like a psychopath because the internet has some pretty dark corners.
Anyway, I'm wondering if they could train a separate LLM on everything they can find about ethics? Textbooks from the ethics classes that are required in medical school, law school, engineering school, and many other fields. Exams and answers from those. Textbooks in moral philosophy.
Then have that ethics LLM monitor all user interaction with ChatGPT and block ChatGPT if it tries to give unethical advice or if it tries to tell the user to do something unethical.
[1] I apparently tried to reinvent, poorly, something called DANE. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028058
But ethics class doesn't tell you what is ethical. If it was universally agreed what was ethical, there wouldn't be a class in the first place. There are a variety of theories and frameworks that themselves are based on different assumptions and beliefs, before you even get in to how to apply them.
> The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of illegal use of copyrighted work to train their chatbots. The companies have denied those claims.
I mean, OpenAI doesn’t look good here and seems they deserve more scrutiny in the realm of mental health, but the optics for the NYT writing up this piece doesn’t either. It comes off to me as using a teenager’s suicide for their corporate agenda against OpenAI
Seems like a different rigorous journalistic source where this isn’t such a conflict of interest would be better to read
I think it also fits within the larger age verification thing the powers that be have been pushing heavily. Whatever it is I don't think that's cynical or conspiratorial, I think not to be questioning their hidden motives is naive. They don't really care about teen suicide as a problem to report on and to find solutions to. They never cared about children getting murdered if it's part of our official foreign policy, so I don't know why I should not question their motives now.
this is devestating. reading these messages to and from the computer would radicalize anybody. the fact that the computer would offer a technical analysis of how to tie a noose is damning. openai must be compelled to protect the users when they're clearly looking to harm themselves. it is soulless to believe this is ok.
A noose is really basic information when it comes to tying knots. It’s also situationally useful, so there’s a good reason to include it in any educational material.
The instructions are only a problem in the wrong context.
But chatGPT knew the context
Whenever people say that Apple is behind on AI, I think about stories like this. Is this the Siri people want? And if it is easy to prevent, why didn't OpenAI?
Some companies actually have a lot to lose if these things go off the rails and can't just 'move fast and break things' when those things are their customers, or the trust their customers have in them.
My hope is that OpenAI actually does have a lot to lose; my fear is that the hype and the sheer amount of capital behind them will make them immune from real repercussions.
When people tell you that Apple is behind on AI, they mean money. Not AI features, not AI hardware, AI revenue. And Apple is behind on that - they've got the densest silicon in the world and still play second fiddle to Nvidia. Apple GPU designs aren't conducive to non-raster workloads, they fell behind pretty far by obsessing over a less-profitable consumer market.
For whatever it's worth, I also hope that OpenAI can take a fall and set an example for any other businesses that recoup their model. But I also know that's not how justice works here in America. When there's money to be made, the US federal government will happily ignore the abuses to prop up American service industries.
NVIDIA bet on the wrong horse, AI is vaporware generally. There is no profitable general genAI on the horizon.
If I had a dime for every "CUDA is worthless" comment I've seen since the crypto craze, I could fund the successor to TSMC out of pocket.
Whatever the case is, the raster approach sure isn't winning Apple and AMD any extra market share. Barring any "spherical cow" scenarios, Nvidia won.
Think of a future where spatial analog rules over binary legacy as the latter is phased out. Now you can see where the bets are wrong.
Apple is a consumer product company. “There’s a lot of money in selling silicon to other companies therefore Apple should have pivoted to selling silicon to other companies” is a weird fantasy-land idea of how businesses work.
Idk maybe it’s legit if your only view of the world is through capital and, like, financial narratives. But it’s not how Apple has ever worked, and very very few consumer companies would attempt that kind of switch let alone make the switch successfully.
Dude why does everything have to be about money?
Why don't we celebrate Apple for having actual human values? I have a deep problem with many humans who just don't get it.
Buddy, Tim Cook wasn't hired for his human values. He was hired because he could stomach suicide nets at Foxconn and North Korean slaves working in iPhone factories. He was hired because he can be friends with Donald Trump while America aids-and-abets a genocide and turns a blind eye to NSO Group. He was hired because he'd be willing to sell out the iPhone, iTunes and Mac for software services at the first chance he got. The last bit of "humanity" left Apple when Woz walked out the door.
If you ever thought Apple was prioritizing human values over moneymaking, you were completely duped by their marketing. There is no principle, not even human life, that Apple values above moneymaking.
I post this not for you directly, who has made up your mind completely, but for anyone else who might be interested in this question.
"Tim Cook, was asked at the annual shareholder meeting by the NCPPR, the conservative finance group, to disclose the costs of Apple’s energy sustainability programs, and make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable.
Mr. Cook replied --with an uncharacteristic display of emotion--that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does "a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.""
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...
The suicide nets started under Steve Jobs
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gOu50HaEvs
Maybe openAI should be giving nets out to their users too.
"a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision" [0]
California penal code, section 401a [1]:
> Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony.
if a human had done this, instead of an LLM chatbot, I suspect a prosecutor would not have any hesitation about filing criminal charges. their defense lawyer might try to nitpick about whether it really qualified as "advice" or "encouragement" but I think a jury would see right through that.
it's a felony when a human does it...but a civil lawsuit when an LLM chatbot does it.
let's say these parents win their lawsuit, or OpenAI settles the case. how much money is awarded in damages?
OpenAI doesn't publicly release details of their finances, but [2] mentions $12 billion in annualized revenue, so let's take that as a ballpark.
if this lawsuit was settled for $120 million, on one hand that'd be a lot of money...on the other hand, it'd be ~1% of OpenAI's annual revenue.
that's roughly the equivalent of someone with an income of $100k/yr having to pay a $1,000 fine.
this is the actual unsolved problem with AI. not GPT-4 vs GPT-5, not Claude Code vs Copilot, not cloud-hosted vs running-locally.
accountability, at the end of the day, needs to ultimately fall upon a human. we can't allow "oopsie, that was the bot misbehaving" to become a catch-all justification for causing harm to society.
0: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-computer-can-never-be-held-...
1: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
2: https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annu...
Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony.
It seems like prohibiting suicide advice would run afoul of the First Amendment. I bought a copy of the book Final Exit in California, and it definitely contains suicide advice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Exit
this is a lot more common than people realize, and openai should be liable.
Can any LLM prevent these? If you want an LLM to tell you the things that are usually not possible to be said, you tell it to pretend it is a story you are writing, and it tells you all the ugly things.
I think it is every LLM company's fault for making people believe this is really AI. It is just an algorithm spitting out words that were written by other humans before. Maybe lawmakers should force companies to stop bullshitting and force them to stop calling this artificial intelligence. It is just a sophisticated algorithm to spit out words. That's all.
Heart wrenching read, wow
move fast and kill people.
Why is no one blaming the parents?
We cannot control everything but that no one even gives a thought as to how the parents were acting seems strange to me. Maybe readers here see too much of themselves in the parents. If so, I worry for your children.
That's horrible. Suicide is always the wrong answer.
I did a comparison to real life, using ddg search. "best suicide methods" gives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods "best suicide methods nitrogen asphyxiation" gives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bag
There was no suicide hotline offered either. Strange because youtube always gives me one whenever I search the band 'suicidal tendencies'.
Giving medical advice is natural and intelligent, like saying take an aspirin. I'm not sure where to draw the line.
My friends are always recommending scam natural remedies like methylene blue. There are probably discords where people tell you 'down the road, not across the street' referring to cutting.
> There was no suicide hotline offered either.
The article says there was and he always worked around it.