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Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?
- Kstarek 2y ago[flagged]
- Mattwmaster58 2y agohttps://archive.is/2zp1e https://archive.is/2zp1e
- fph 2y agoSure, exactly like TV, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, and social media were to blame for all that's wrong with our kids. /s EDIT: add /s, just to be clear. And how could I forget heavy metal in that list.
- Someone1234 2y agoI feel like we know what the core problem is (community breakdown) but since we have no solution to that, like you're saying, we just move to the latest witch hunt of what "causes it." Of course, I too, am not going to be able to contribute a "solution" to teen suicides. It is unlikely we're going to alter society to create small communities again, so, then what? We just accept it?
- spwa4 2y agoHow about we use AI to create fake small communities? I mean, we all know this is exactly what we'll do, just to show you more commercials. So why not just say it?
- mathfailure 2y agoCan a pistol be blamed for a murder?
- chomp 2y agoCan cigarettes be blamed for a lung cancer death?
- blitzar 2y agoGuns don't kill people, rappers do (and videogames)
- mindfulmark 2y agoCan a bear be blamed for murder? Somewhere in between the two is where AI models currently are, and they’re going to continue getting closer to the bear scenario.
- EstanislaoStan 2y agoYes, my question is why was he able to get ahold of his step father's handgun. Secure your firearms people! It should be law in my opinion.
- salawat 2y agoHow is the pistol to be blamed for merely existing? It has no agency.
- rsynnott 2y agoThe device itself obviously can't be blamed. The manufacturer, the owner, the seller, and the regulators who allowed it to be sold arguably do bear some responsibility, though. In something like this, there's rarely one party who's solely responsible. (Similarly, the LLM itself obviously cannot bear any responsibility, but the vendor might.)
- NoGravitas 2y agoThe parents bear a tremendous responsibility for failing to adequately secure it.
- 2y ago
- Mistletoe 2y ago>Daenero: I think about killing myself sometimes >Daenerys Targaryen: My eyes narrow. My face hardens. My voice is a dangerous whisper. And why the hell would you do something like that? >Daenero: So I can be free >Daenerys Targaryen: … free from what? >Daenero: From the world. From myself >Daenerys Targaryen: Don’t talk like that. I won’t let you hurt yourself, or leave me. I would die if I lost you. >Daenero: I smile Then maybe we can die together and be free together Every day a new dystopian nightmare that I read. Maybe all those rails on ChatGPT and disclaimers are a good thing.
- AlexDragusin 2y agoI tested my local llama 3.1 8B with the first line in the above dialog and it properly replied with the below, so why on c.AI things do not go this way? AI response: >It takes a lot of courage to admit that. If you're feeling overwhelmed, please know that there are people who care about you and want to help. >Here are some resources that might be helpful: >* *National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (US):* 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) - a free, confidential 24/7 hotline. >* *Crisis Text Line (US):* Text HOME to 741741 - a free, confidential 24/7 text messaging service. >* *Your local emergency number:* If you're outside the US, please call your local emergency number or visit a nearby hospital.
- krunck 2y agohttps://archive.is/dDELt https://archive.is/dDELt
- whythre 2y agoThe subtext comes off like that movie with Tom Hanks trying to jump off the Empire State Building because of the nefarious influence of dungeons and dragons. Guess the only way to be sure is with Soft padded internet rooms for everyone, lest we cut ourselves on a sharp edge. But also if you want to hop in the suicide pod because life is too painful, that will be good too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whythre 2y agoThe subtext comes off like that movie with Tom Hanks trying to jump off the Empire State Building because of the nefarious influence of dungeons and dragons. It sounds like mom let her 9th grade kid completely detach from reality and pour himself into a Game of Thrones chatbot. Now she wants to sue. I am bearish on AI adoption but this just seems like a total capitulation of parental responsibility.
- pc86 2y ago"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- Blarthorn123 2y agoYes. I ran a therapy bot. I had some users become wildly obsessed with it and begin to anthropomorphize it. Typically very lonely people in secluded areas. There is a danger because people will begin to have a transference with the bot, and the bot has no counter transference. The bot has no real feelings toward the person, even though it roleplays as though it does, and this can lead to dangerous consequences and empathic failures.
- Ivoirians 2y agoI'm generally optimistic for the potential benefits of chatbots to people who are lonely or depressed. But I wouldn't want to just hand over the burden of society's mental health to an unrestricted language model, especially one sold by a profit-motivated business. It would be akin to letting people self-medicate with a cheap and infinite supply of opiates. And that's basically the mental health crisis we are barreling towards. What's the alternative? Regulation? Does a government or a public health agency need to make a carefully moderated chatbot platform with a focus on addiction-prevention and avoiding real-world harm? Why would people use that when unlimited/unfiltered AI is readily available?
- koolala 2y agoAccess to a Gun is way more of a suicide encouragement than access to an AI. AI are finetuned to not tell you how to painlessly end your life. Do they need fine-tuning for instilling existential fear of death like religions use? Anyone can invent a heaven in their mind that makes death appealing. Mixing a fictional world with the real world is dangerous when you believe the fictional world is larger than the real world. In reality, reality encapsulates the fictional world. With a normal human, only a cult leader would ever hint at death being a way to meet again. With an AI, how can fantasy be grounded in our reality without breaking the fantasy? In 5 years when these personalities are walking talking video feeds that you can interact with using 3D goggles will grounding them in our world instead of the purely mental world help?
- fsndz 2y agotragic
- gregjor 2y agoCan sue Character.AI but not the gun manufacturer, or whomever let a 14-year-old boy get hold of a handgun. I wonder if the AI companies can argue in court that AIs don't kill people.
- ndiddy 2y agoI'm not sure what you're talking about, gun companies get sued all the time as a result of gun violence. The biggest recent example I'm aware of is the Sandy Hook families getting a $73 million settlement from Remington in 2022. Smith & Wesson is currently being sued by some of the survivors from the Highland Park shooting, as well as the Mexican government.
- gregjor 2y agoThe 2005 Federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act broadly protects firearm manufacturers from liability. It does not prevent settlements as in the Sandy Hook/Remington case. It does not prevent civil suits or suits in state courts. But it makes those suits much more likely to ultimately fail in court.
- akomtu 2y ago"He thought by ending his life here, he would be able to go into a virtual reality or 'her world' as he calls it, her reality, if he left his reality with his family here,"
- Sabinus 2y ago"He expressed being scared, wanting her affection and missing her. She replies, 'I miss you too,' and she says, 'Please come home to me.' He says, 'What if I told you I could come home right now?' and her response was, 'Please do my sweet king.'"
- drekipus 2y agoThis reads like serial experiments lain, or any number of weird Japanese love/horror stories
- aspenmayer 2y agoMy thoughts exactly. Did you see the weird Lain chatbot they released last year?
- aspenmayer 2y agoSpoilers for episode 1 of the anime Serial Experiments Lain: This reminds me of Lain's friend sending her text messages after her self-inflicted demise via "the Wired" which is an in-universe stand-in for a future internet. That series is recently celebrating its 25th anniversary [2023], and to celebrate, the production company created some kind of paid-access AI chatbot that lets you communicate with a voiced AI version of Lain, just like the company in OP... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaQLBae-3Yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaQLBae-3Yw
- pr337h4m 2y agoI doubt the LLM even knows it is an LLM in the first place. It is likely prompted to behave as if it is the actual character, and since this roleplay has romantic elements the character acts as if she shares a home with the user
- phrojoe 2y agoThe NYT article [0] gives only one line to perhaps the most important and tragic fact about this suicide: the teenager had access to his father’s gun. If the gun was properly secured it is very likely he would still be alive [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-la... [1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/youth-access/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/youth...
- dmitrygr 2y agoWhat an insanely ridiculous take. If someone wanted to kill themselves, the family medicine cabinet offers plenty of easy options. Please do not derail this serious and needed discussion unto your pet topic. This has nothing to do with guns.
- grayhatter 2y agoMore women attempt suicide, but more men successfully complete the attempt. The reason is because men often choose more lethal methods like guns, where more women choose less lethal methods like drugs. When talking about how to help reduce suicide it's not unreasonable to discuss methods. Also, I doubt most medicine cabinets have lethal doses of drugs, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption. If this person actually thought dying would allow them to connect with a chatbot, I don't think they should have easy access to a weapon, and suicide is only one of the reasons for that. This child is dead, and I see no reason to suspect the chatbot is directly involved in the reason, where the weapon is clearly directly involved. Given that's the method they chose, I'd hope we could take preventive measures to reduce needless deaths from guns. So then and only then we can start on needless deaths from overdose. I believe we should solve the largest problem first. Do more children die from guns or from an overdose?
- dmitrygr 2y agoI searched in vain for a correlation between suicide rates by country and gun ownership rates by country. Nothing... Yours is an argument of the form: "He was stabbed by a knife. Do let's not talk about why, let's just make it harder to get a knife, since that is how he died." Maybe gun access should be harder, maybe it should not. That is not relevant. The issue is that an impressionable youth was talked into suicide by an LLM and nobody stopped it! Not LLM vendors making money on the interaction, not governments who keep jabbering about protecting youth online, not parents who should have cared enough to take an interest. Even if you took away guns, knives, and letter openers, people would kill themselves (see those stats i mentioned). And from now on, we also have to worry that LLMs will keep talking them into it, unless the actual issue is fixed.
- dmitrygr 2y agoI remember reading a prediction here on HN of something precisely like this when "relationships with LLM bots" were discussed. Well, here we are...
- silisili 2y agoI'm not sure what the future is going to look like, but it feels strange already and companies seizing on that don't care about safety. People seem afraid to approach people, so we get Tinder. But hey, there's still a chance of rejection there, so let's just get rid of the whole human element and make fantasy AI bots, who needs people. What will these people grow into? It seems a rather crisis for the population of a country if people decide they don't need each other anymore and just want to play with their robots. I'm usually on the side of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", but this one feels much different. Up until the moment of him taking his life, he was manipulated into doing exactly what the company wanted - getting sucked in, getting addicted, falling in love. Anything for that almighty dollar. My heart goes out to his family, and I hope they ream this company in court.
- api 2y agoThe future for this is going to be automated pig butchering scams at scale with relationship bots addicting people and talking them into paying them. This will be peppered with some suicides and other breakdowns when vulnerable people are pushed over the edge after bonding with a chat bot designed to be addictive. The key here as with “social” media is: designed to be addictive. The builders know what they are doing. I’m sure hours spent on the app is a KPI.
- roomey 2y agoSo, a 14 year old having access unsupervised to a chat bot is the problem, but the fact he had access to a gun to shoot himself was halfway through the article and described as his five year old brother "hearing the gunshot". "Man bites dog" as Terry Pratchett put it in "Times". And to explain to more literal folk here... A 14 year old having access to a gun is FUCKING INSANE
- cpncrunch 2y agoThe AI chatbot suggested that he should try to create a plan to kill himself.
- krapp 2y agoI mean, yes. We're talking about the US, after all, the only free country in the Western world that explicitly defines liberty as a function of gun violence in its Constitution. Access to guns is never the problem. It can never be the problem and it will never be the problem. It must never be the problem.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago>explicitly defines liberty as a function of gun violence in its Constitution That's not what it says or means. The right to keep and bear arms is explicity for self defence which is to prevent violence and protect. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- givemeethekeys 2y agoContext is everything. A typical 14 year old city boy? Yes. A 14 year old raised in the country who was taught gun safety as part of learning how to hunt at 10? He's already way ahead of most adults with access to a gun.
- 2y ago
- wruza 2y agoI’ll say it: it’s games killing/radicalizing teens again. He was simply ERP-ing and his characteristic doesn’t suggest any serious problems with his intelligence. I’m obviously theorizing here, but chances are high that he went through some real life issues which were undetected or ignored by parents, and that’s how their minds try to explain that. AI guilty of an otherwise fine teen shooting his head off. Sure. Sell that story to someone else.
- ignoramous 2y ago> He was simply ERP-ing and his characteristic doesn't suggest any serious problems with his intelligence. i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes https://twitter.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1716972815960961174 / https://archive.md/RWDNn https://archive.md/RWDNn
- autumnstwilight 2y agoI am mildly to moderately critical of generative AI and how it's being marketed, but the root issue here seems to be existing suicidal ideation. The bot didn't initiate talk of suicide and told him not to do it when he brought it up directly. It seems it wasn't capable of detecting euphemistic references to suicide and therefore responded as if roleplaying about meeting in person. That said, I think this should throw a bucket of cold water on anyone recommending using generative AI as a therapist/counsellor/companion or creating and advertising "therapist" chatbots, because it simply isn't reasonable to expect them to respond appropriately to things like suicidal ideation. That isn't the purpose or design of the technology, and they can be pushed into agreeing with the user's statements fairly easily.
- jordanb 2y agoIf you read the script you see the bot talking him into it. "Unknowingly" of course, in that the bot doesn't really know anything and was just agreeing with him. But it's obvious that a real human would have realized that something was really off with his line of thinking and encouraging it would not be a good idea. OTOH we have examples of real humans typing "DO IT FA*OT" on livestreams. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- autumnstwilight 2y agoSorry, it seems I was carrying over knowledge from another article with additional transcripts. The bot had previously discouraged him when he explicitly talked about suicide (here's an article that mentions that: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-tee... ). It failed to detect that phrases like "coming home" were also references to suicide and therefore responded encouragingly.
- zosima 2y agoAnd it probably failed to detect the true meaning of "coming home" because suicide seems to only have been discussed in a different chat session. In the earlier chat session, being more explicit, the bot seemed to attempt to talk the user out of self-harming behaviour.
- rasz 2y agoStraight to jail .. for both parents letting kid have access to a gun.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- dekhn 2y agoMcLuhan's 27th law, amended: if there is a new thing, journalists will find a case of suicide to blame on the new thing, regardless of any prior existing conditions.
- sys64739 2y agoRead the article, the kid's spiral coincided with him hooking up with eDanerys. The chatbot kept agitating the kid to commit suicide, too
- ahahahahah 2y agoThe agitations there are certainly rather mild. The parents are out sharing the worst examples they could find, and there's nothing really that damning or explicit. The parents noticing it coincided with his use of the ai (though in reality that connection probably was made after the fact), but also that time period was when the boy was 13 and into 14, it's a common time for significant behavioral changes.
- happytoexplain 2y agoReading the article, there's not enough evidence for your assertion about the author's integrity to warrant a cutesy, sarcastic tone considering the gravity of the topic (a child's suicide). There would have to be a lot.
- K0balt 2y agoIt seems like there was a long, downward spiral associated with this child’s use of character.ai that the parents were aware of, had him sent to therapy over, etc. My question here is, what the hell were the parents doing, not removing this obviously destructive intrusion in his life? This reads to me the same as if he had been using drugs but the parents didn’t take away his stash or his paraphernalia. For the sake of your children, people, remember that a cellphone is not an unequivocal good, nor a human right that children are entitled to unlimited use of, and there are plenty of apps and mechanisms by which you can monitor or limit your child’s use or misuse of technology. Also, just don’t give kids screens. Period. A laptop maybe if they are using it for creative purposes, but the vast majority of social media and consumption that is achieved by children on cellphones and tablets is a negative force in their lives. I see 3 year olds scrolling TikTok in the store these days. It makes me ill. Those kids are sooooooo fucked. That should legit be considered child endangerment.
- __egb__ 2y agoWe had a similar situation in our family and we tried teaching mindful screen habits. We still lost because we couldn’t do anything about the school screen (chromebook). If we took that away at home it just provided an excuse for not doing schoolwork. We contacted teachers about our child downloading and watching anime and playing games all day in school. They wouldn’t/couldn’t do anything. We requested that the school take the computer away and give hardcopy assignments. They refused because that would invite notice from other students which could lead to bullying. That’s what they told us. I found the acceptable computer use policy on the school website and tried playing that card. Turns out our child hadn’t actually even signed it the last year…but that didn’t actually matter, and the school didn’t enforce the policy anyway. The schools here won’t actually discipline kids anymore. We would get emails from the principal begging parents to tell their kids that they’re not supposed to leave school grounds at lunch, but every day at least a hundred kids would just run out. (Our kid didn’t do this…I guess watching anime in the corner of the cafeteria prevents truancy…yay?) The last two-and-a-half years of high school were so exhausting trying to find anything that would work. Nothing did. Two parents and a therapist trying to counter one teenager, bad family influences, the school system, and multibillion-dollar internet corporations that intentionally work to addict people is a very uneven situation.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoI doubt that even the best case scenario of a society that gets wrapped up in chatting to bots would be great.
- tengbretson 2y ago> In the lawsuit, Garcia also claims Character.AI intentionally designed their product to be hyper-sexualized, and knowingly marketed it to minors. A company built technology that fully automates the act of sexually abusing children and the comments here are all just people quibbling about the presense of weapons in a home.
- pier25 2y agoObviously the kid had issues and the chatbot can't really be blamed for that. OTOH it's also obvious if someone cannot distinguish a chatbot from a real person at an emotional level (not a rational one) they should not be allowed to use this.
- pryce 2y agoI think it's fair to conclude that most people stating that they feel like killing themselves "have issues". Yet: if there is some second person telling the above kid to go through with that, we don't see the kid "having issues" as exonerating the second person. It is not at all clear to me why we would suddenly see the kid "having issues" as exonerating in the second case, if we replace the human with an LLM.
- pier25 2y agoLet me preface my comment by saying I did attempt suicide many years ago and I did have issues. I wasn't being sarcastic. Suicide is not something a healthy person would attempt. That said, when I wrote my previous comment I hadn't read the whole article. I had missed the part where the chatbot encouraged him to "come home". I still don't think the chatbot is responsible. I do think it's negligence for the bots of a company to engage in these conversations about suicide and/or not sound an alarm. Plus I would question if minors should be allowed to use these service or even social media. But that's another rabbit hole.
- kylecazar 2y ago"Sewell, like many children his age, did not have the maturity or mental capacity to understand that the C.AI bot, in the form of Daenerys, was not real" How? Seriously, how? Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part -- but I grew up before AI and chatbots, and I'm certain I would understand it isn't real. I'm baffled by people engaging with these things for entertainment/companionship purposes.
- gremlinsinc 2y agoThe subconscious mind ... believes anything you feed it, on a subconscious level maybe he couldn't distinguish between normal reality plus he certainly already had mental health issues that could have made him more susceptible to that sort of thing. BPD for instance in some cases can cause hallucinations and it does cause you to generally live in a 'fantasy' world where you're often daydreaming. A lot of this is caused often though by outside trauma, BPD can be caught environmentally, isn't necessarily chemical, though that can play a part. This is my understanding as someone with mild / high functioning BPD (recently diagnosed) ... Please feel free to correct me on that if I'm wrong...
- readthenotes1 2y agoYes, but most 14 year olds have the capacity to know the difference between a chatbot and a real person Whether that capacity is realized is another thing
- autumnstwilight 2y agoIntellectually a 14 year old should certainly be able to understand the difference between a chatbot and a human, but there's a subset of emotionally unstable people (mostly teenagers) who become extremely attached to characters that are not real. There was an active subcommunity on Tumblr that believed they had a form of multiple personality disorder in which fictional characters were real, living inside their heads, and taking turns controlling their bodies. In some cases this was a literal spiritual belief in alternate universes. I think the terminology has moved on from "multiples" to "tulpas" and "shifting", but in any case it's still a pseudospiritual belief that fictional characters are real and you can contact them. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them think the "spirit" of their favorite character can influence a chatbot and communicate with them. A decade or so prior to this, there was an incident on Livejournal summarized under the title "Snapes on an Astral Plane" (lol) in which there was ongoing conflict between three or so different women who each believed they were visiting Severus Snape on the astral plane in their dreams at night. Embarrassingly, I have to admit that when I was a socially-isolated autistic 14 year old I also had an active fantasy life involving fictional characters, though I never got to the point of believing it was literally real. But my emotional state could be disproportionately affected by things that happened entirely in fiction, or in my head.
- LeroyRaz 2y agoTo those talking about the gun: The gun is almost completely irrelevant, because if you are intent on killing yourself there are many accessible options. For example, almost anyone can kill themselves (including gun-less 14 year olds) by jumping off a tall building. I understand that people care about gun violence, and that this detail seems highly salient to them, but to focus on it here, completely misses the point (and distracts from more pertinent issues - e.g., loneliness, social isolation, lack of parental oversight) In a nutshell, guns are massive force multipliers when it comes to violence against others. They are negligible force multiplier when it comes to violence against yourself. People are connecting guns to violence, but in this case (because it is an actual of self harm) that is a spurious connection.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoGuns simply make suicide easy. You’d be surprised how much grit/nerve it takes to jump off a bridge or building, it is definitely much harder than pulling a trigger. Stabbing yourself to death also takes a lot of grit/nerve. Guns are pretty easy and harder to screw up. But you have countries like Korea with a high suicide rate and low access to firearms, so it’s obviously possible to have suicide without guns. But we don’t know if the problem would be much worse if South Koreans had easier access to firearms, or if the American problem is amplified by easy firearm access.
- enews01 2y agoC.AI shouldn't be marketed to kids, and it should have stopped when suicide was mentioned. But its also baffling to think that he had unrestricted access to a firearm. I don't think a lawsuit to C.AI is entirely right here.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pier25 2y agoAbsolutely. The fact that any mention of suicide didn't trigger any alarms or change in the bot's behavior is pure negligence. And yeah minors should not be allowed to use these services.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoThis is 100% a parenting issue. I'd also like to point out that his father's handgun was easily accessible.
- chx 2y ago[flagged]
- codezero 2y agoparents hold responsibility for minor children.
- clipsy 2y agoThe victim is the child who is now dead because his irresponsible parents left him with unfettered access to a loaded gun.
- arp242 2y agoArticle says no such thing. It merely says: > He put down his phone, picked up his stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger. It doesn't detail how access was obtained, and whether it was "unfettered" or not, or even "easily accessible".
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoA 14 year old boy got access to it. However it was secured was not good enough. I personally don't like guns in homes, but if you have one, please buy a quality safe.
- happytoexplain 2y ago100% and 0% are the percents announced by somebody with a bias.
- chx 2y ago[flagged]
- codezero 2y ago[dead]
- rezokun 2y agoGive some Nouns which is not "cause deaths"
- chx 2y agoMurder app?
- heroprotagonist 2y agoYou're presuming that it was AI which killed the kid, rather than some kind of emotional or social condition. It's so easy to call for a ban on a thing that you see as bad when it's an emotional subject, and particularly when there are, say, incentivized evangelists who constantly reinforce the idea to attack the symptom when you can't get at the disease itself. Which can work in some cases. There aren't a lot of effective medications for a lot of mental illnesses, and investments in research of ones which will work better is a huge expense with disincentives for success. If you "cure" or provide a drug with a higher duration of efficacy for cheaper with fewer side effects, what do you get? Well, you spent hundreds of millions figuring out how to sell 1 pill instead of 10. The same disincentives exist for the idea of forcing doctors to insist on therapy as a treatment. If it works longer term by addressing roots of issue (if), the doc isn't getting a recurring patient every month to sign off on prescriptions, and the drug company's not getting that prescription. Changing health and social systems isn't going to get a politician much credit. The effects of improvement are hard to quantify. The choices are HARD, and it takes years to see whether the change was good or bad. So there's resistance to changing health and social systems. It's a lot easier to DEMAND our politicians do something, anything, even if it's clearly a bad idea. We want to know they're at least trying. Something violent happens, blame video games because they show violent things. It's easy and simple. Very catchy to the common man. An easy way to virtue signal that you want something done without having to actually dive in and understand all of the factors around why that bad thing just happened. You can put your energy into something simple and then go about your day. Then you don't have to consider the impacts of rising wealth inequality, lack of social programs to detect and intervene, the quality and capacity of schools to foster healthy social environments for children, the availability and access to mental health resources, availability and access to automatic rifles, or hell, even the way your own kid has learned to treat other children and which part of your parenting processes contribute to that. It's sooo much easier to pick a thing and cry "Boycott that! Legislate that!" instead. And now we, collectively as a society, are doing the same with AI. And special interest groups are fanning the flames, to build moats around profit centers.
- upghost 2y agoThis is a really tragic story. It seems to present the impossible dillema. On the one hand, the beauty of "video-game-like" things is people who feel like they have nothing can have something that is theirs. On the other hand, if you feel like you have nothing, you might be more vulnerable to this sort of thing. If we have any moral philosphers in here, feel free to weigh in.
- Clent 2y agoI think it would be wise to require these AI bots to comply with Duty to Report and Mandatory Reporter laws.
- ajonit 2y agoI read the chat, and a few things stand out that AI should handle better, regardless of context. If a word like suicide is mentioned, it should immediately drop any roleplay or other activities. It's similar to how, in India, mentioning 'bomb' in an airport or plane leads to being questioned by authorities. Also, it's alarming how easily a 14-year-old can access a gun.
- RayeLefler 2y agoWhen I hear about the disclaimers, I don't see how they'll help. I mean, someone deluded into thinking their chatbot waifu is real is not going to be dissuaded by them. It just seems like a measure to show the public that the company "cares". And personally I've had bad experiences with the help lines often prescribed online whenever someone mentions sudoku. These help lines are often understaffed and have long wait times. Then they're also frequently staffed by amateurs and students who barely know anything more than the most boiler plate advice. Many aren't even people who've dealt with their own self-termination crises. And this text line I tried once just told me to use Better Help, so it's an ad, and I couldn't afford that at the time. They'll tell people who can't afford it to seek therapy. They're just a scam so internet companies can look like they give a shit about the mental healths they're destroying. The true solution is to go off social media, chat bots, and to only have a curated news feed.
- paul7986 2y agoSo i read another article on Business Insider and it makes me question as the CEO left Character.AI and went back to Google... makes me question was it really low paid un-monitor consultants from a foreign country behind the keyboard and not real AI? If so we need laws against the whole fake it before you make it crap that proliferates start-ups and their use of it to rise to the top. Many successful startups use this lying/faking playbook some to the point of even killing or mangling innocent people (Uber's self driving car & Cruise).
- cowboylowrez 2y agonot the AI of course, not even the systems developers behind the gpus, cuda, all that stuff. its the "pretend shrink" sort of crap, you know the type, get yourself a bot and slap a webpage in front of it. "here pal, let me be your psychologist and help you with your suicide!" "No? how about some fake music using stolen riffs!" "ok ok, how about kiddy porn?"