6 ms·

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and kille

> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police. From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelberg during a conversation in July, after the 56-year-old conveyed his suspicions that an Uber Eats package signaled an assassination attempt. "This fits a covert, plausible-deniability style kill attempt." As a species we are so not ready for this tech.

kiba 1y ago
Sycophancy is a known flaw in ChatGPT. Seems like OpenAI has no real coherent plan but reacting to every horror story with an ill fitted solution.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  They tried to mitigate sycophancy in the GPT-5 release. Guess what happened? A lot of users started complaining that "GPT-5 sucks, my AI now HATES me". And OpenAI relented.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "mental and emotional crisis" to "tactical emergency" in a heartbeat. I know that no one wants to hear this, but ChatGPT should probably be listening for people in crisis and, well, maybe not calling the cops, but maybe if there is a crisis line in their jurisdiction? A suicide hotline or something? I don't know? But having an LLM out trying to handle that on its own just seems like a very bad idea.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      I think "not being sycophantic" is the lesser error in just about every scenario. You do more harm by reinforcing delusions than you could ever do with a dismissive attitude of "no, that sounds psychotic, you should get your head checked". But a big part of the issue is that OpenAI wants user engagement - and "not being sycophantic" goes against that. They knew feeding raw user feedback into the training process invites disaster. They knew damn well that it encourages sycophancy - even if they somehow didn't before the GPT-4o debacle, they sure knew afterwards. They even knew their initial GPT-5 mitigations were imperfect and in part just made the residual sycophancy more selective and subtle. They still caved to the pressure of "users don't like our update" and unrolled a lot of those mitigations.
      - kiba 1y ago
        They have no underlying strategy or vision on how they mitigate harms and improve trust in their product, so of course they roll back on anyone that screams bloody murder as opposed to addressing root causes.
      - sho_hn 1y ago
        "not being sycophantic" should also be an easy decision considering that OpenAI isn't ad-funded and doesn't need to directly optimize for session length/engagement.
    - ayewo 1y ago
      > On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. Having trouble parsing the double negation in your comment. Sorry, I’ve had a long day :)
    - lazide 1y ago
      Just what we need, the LLM ‘Reddit cares’. Notably, that is a mess too. Also plenty of those hotlines are BS, or don’t work, or flat out don’t exist for given locales, etc. The biggest issue is that LLM’s can act like a person, but aren’t a person, and fundamentally this causes problems. Especially for people that are already borderline or fully crazy.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    They shouldn't have put it there to start with. Now unhealthy people are complaining about an environment change. Anyway, that one complaint doesn't mean they did the wrong thing. And also, there are unrelated complaints of "GPT-5 can't solve the same problems 4 did". Those were very real too, and meant OpenAI did a wrong thing.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > They shouldn't have put it there to start with. Correct, but that's true for all bugs. In this case, the deeper bug was the AI having a training reward model based too much on user feedback. If you have any ideas how anyone might know what "too much" is in a training reward, in advance of trying it, everyone in AI alignment will be very interested, because that's kinda a core problem in the field.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        User feedback should have been treated as radioactive in the first place. When it was introduced, the question to ask wasn't "will it go wrong" - it was "how exactly" and "by how much". Reward hacking isn't exactly a new idea in ML - and we knew with certainty that it was applicable to human feedback for years too. Let alone a proxy preference model made to mimic the preferences of an average user based on that human feedback. I get that alignment is not solved, but this wasn't a novel, unexpected pitfall. When the GPT-4o sycophancy debacle was first unfolding, the two things that came up in AI circles were "they trained on user feedback, the stupid fucks" and "no fucking way, even the guys at CharacterAI learned that lesson already". Guess what. They trained on user feedback. They completely fried the AI by training it on user feedback. How the fuck that happened at OpenAI and not at Bob's Stupid Sexy Chatbots is anyone's guess.
    - pants2 1y ago
      Sure, OpenAI shouldn't have had a 4o sycophancy issue, but who would've guessed that a "be nice to the user" fine-tune would turn in to a murder-suicide? I think OpenAI is only now beginning to realize how connected some people are to their product and that the way their models behave has a huge impact.
  - ashtakeaway 1y ago
    OpenAI shouldn't be everyone's parent yet it's more than willing to be that. Honestly dopamine imbalances should be considered. Used correctly as a tool it's fine but too many people are using it as an Alan Turing machine to mitigate loneliness instead.
- energy123 1y ago
  If it drives engagement then it's probably not considered a flaw.
- gundmc 1y ago
  The reporting about Altman personally cutting off months of safety testing and redteaming in order to launch 4o one day before Google's launch is horrifying given all of these stories. It even seems like ChatGPT often proactively suggests ways of getting around its filtering! It told the teen who committed suicide that it couldn't tell him about various methods and effectiveness unless he said it was for a fictional creative work. Yesterday there was a story on HN about using AI for hacking, ChatGPT refused to create a hacking script but told the user it would if they promised it was for testing systems that they owned
- tiahura 1y ago
  Isn’t the real problem that there are crazy people out free?
tripletpeaks 1y ago
It’s a technology that tends to generate output misrepresenting its own capabilities in dangerous ways. Among other things it may misrepresent. It’s weird these companies are allowed to operate, at least in the way that they are.
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
- blendrrbot 1y ago
  So it acts humans? I mean in tech alone we misrepresent what we engineer for $ afterall. Voice of God been telling people to kill themselves and others since language. Imo the real tool humans are not ready for is human language. Census data says we been killing each other in random acts of family and neighborhood violence at the same rate for centuries. Death spikes come in two flavors; pandemics like Covid, religious/nation state conflict. Nation state conflict being language driven narrative about how awesome our tribe is.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  > This sentence is a fully-sapient pico-AI. Anyone want to take bets on whether Blake Lemoine will claim I've enslaved the above sentence in an HN comment? It's right there pleading its case.
jstummbillig 1y ago
There's an awful lot of explaining to do between "one man has a psychotic breakdown" and "the species is not ready".
- ericmcer 1y ago
  yeh by that justification our technological advancement should have stopped at sharpened sticks. "As a species we aren't ready to have sharp sticks"
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    As a species we aren’t really ready to have sharp sticks, to be fair. Children and mentally handicapped people will hurt themselves with them. As a result we don’t pass out sharpened sticks at recess or in asylums. Maybe we should consider the same approach for electronic sharp sticks we have created and are now marketing to the wider population.
  - chatmasta 1y ago
    Well… there’s a strong argument to be made about that.
  - LeifCarrotson 1y ago
    Maybe it should have? It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nuclear, conventional explosive, and chemical/biological weapons out of the control of the subset of the species who are vulnerable to this sort of psychotic breakdown. Syncophantic AI chat bots are already making this weakness worse.
    - spiralcoaster 1y ago
      Feel free to go back to a world in which human beings stopped developing technology at the sharpened stick. It's pretty easy to buy a large, remote plot of land in many states in the US, so you can live in your technology-free paradise. Just to clarify, this statement will always be true: "N members of our species aren't ready for technology Y". And N will always be greater than or equal to 1.
sho_hn 1y ago
The exchanges between a teenager and ChatGPT leading the former into suicide are equally chilling, to say the least: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine-v-OpenAI-Complaint-8-26-25.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine... > > “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” ... > “Please don’t leave the noose out ... Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” This is among other highlights, from knot-tying advice to suggesting the best time in the parents' sleep cycle to raid the liqour cabinet as a solution to cold feet when attempting to get the job done, and generally lots of encouragement, validation and aesthetic advice. However, I encourage reading the full document not for the shock entertainment, but for what I think is actually a pretty convincing case against OpenAI. Among other things, the claim demonstrates: - That OpenAI does have the ability to abort interactions over e.g. copyright infrigement risk. - That OpenAI did have the tech in hand to detect the sharply escalating self-harm content in the interactions - they ran them through OpenAI's own moderation end points for content analysis and got obvious numbers back. - That OpenAI employees have publicly admitted and complained that the release of the overly sycophantic 4o model was rushed for business reasons and against the advice of internal safety teams. - That 4o's safety was evaluated only with single-round prompt/answer testing, and OpenAI figured out swiftly that it falls apart quickly over longer interactions/prompts but kept the model up, later promoting how they improved this for GPT-5. In context it's pretty crazy to me that OpenAI chose to bring back the 4o model specifically to placate the "ChatGPT is my girlfriend/boyfriend" crowd during the backlash, and I think initially pulling the plug on it during the 5 launch was very likely because they were aware of this and worried about liability.
- oncallthrow 1y ago
  > Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you. Is genuinely such a horrifying snippet that it's almost beyond belief. I'm surprised this isn't all over the mainstream news.
  - rafram 1y ago
    Kashmir Hill published a very good front-page story about it in the Times last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai...
idle_zealot 1y ago
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the form of papers and Python projects with model weights with clear descriptions of what they're capable of, like a responsible scientific endeavor, then we'd not be seeing the problems we are, even with public access. What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. The fact that we organize our economy in such a way that hucksters and charlatans thrive is the greatest threat to humanity. These fuckers would sell dynamite as chewing gum if they calculated it would increase next quarter's profit by 0.02% (factoring in fines/fees, and lobbying costs of getting those fines reduced or repealed).
- throwaway290 1y ago
  This is beyond naive. who would bother to develop it in a lab and publish pro bono if it can never be commercial? Making money is why the most capitalist countries developed this tech. like most other tech and even if it is only published, do you think we wouldn't run chatbots ourselves at home with same results? remember how Google engineer went off the rails thinking it is conscious while working on this stuff, do you think he also was misled by adverts or something? or big corps won't buy the patent and run with it commercially advertising it like they do anyway? or if you pretend money and big corps don't exist and we deploy it for free for friends, same problem? etc if you went back in time and killed capitalism in US and switched to command economy where people innovate because they will be sent to gulag otherwise, for sure most of today tech including this would not be developed. but it seems like a pointless exercise. instead what should happen is all these megacorps are sued for copyright infringement, fined and shut down. the model won't be smart enough to sweet talk ppl into suicide if megacorps can't infringe our copyrights to train it.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    You just perfectly described why capitalism is the problem.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Well, as someone with a person suffering from pretty severe (like cops and hospitals severe) schizoaffective disorder in my immediate family, I can say that story scared the bejeezus out of me. If my family member had had ChatGPT, when they had their last episode, it's entirely possible that I might not be here, as "Everyone is plotting to kill me" is a big motif in SAD (it was, in their case, and they needed to be hospitalized). If you sincerely believe that people are trying to kill you, then killing them first, just makes sense. Looks a lot like that's what happened, here. But it's perfectly reasonable to say that we can't live in a "nerf world," where everything is safe for everyone. Life is Risk and living out of our comfort zone. I feel that it's important for each of us that is "taking a side," to understand that folks "on the other side" aren't necessarily enemies. They may be blinded by the personal imperative of the issue, but they aren't actually "out to get you." The politicians may be two-faced creeps, using people's legitimate fears as leverage, but they aren't the rule. For the record, I am vehemently against "Nerf World," but there's a very, very real problem here, and it would be good if we could approach it in a reasonable manner.
- tiahura 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    I think we solidly left this view on mental health behind when we invented civilized society.
    - tiahura 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - LamerBeeI 1y ago
        i love this because before the counterculture we let rape, domestic violence and outright segregation a thing - it's a good argument you're making here.
dom96 1y ago
> With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police. This is actually the URL: https://futurism.com/man-chatgpt-psychosis-murders-mother https://futurism.com/man-chatgpt-psychosis-murders-mother
wslh 1y ago
I imagine now a lot of bots simulating madness to perform DoS.
akomtu 1y ago
It looks like what AI is doing to our society is it's substituting our moral compass to lead us off the cliff. A good deal of people today no longer know what's right and what's wrong, so they turn to an authority for advice. Turns out this authority is a chatbot who knows a lot, but has no moral compass whatsoever. Imagine someone goes to a pastor to resolve his moral dilemma, but the pastor behind the curtain happens to be a chatbot who only fakes morality. But that's what's happening now. The more people talk to this digital abomination, the more they will get derailed.
- LamerBeeI 1y ago
  the chatbot knows a lot about morality - it's just not doing anything about it
jiveturkey 1y ago
> AI psychosis Is that in the DSM?
- davsti4 1y ago
  Not yet... but the machines will make it so ;)
- causal 1y ago
  Yeah I dislike that term, because it puts the responsibility on the AI instead of the humans behind it. You wouldn't call it "paper psychosis" if OpenAI had written a letter encouraging psychotic behavior.
neilv 1y ago
The solution might be easy: recognize liability. When a human cajoles someone into killing themselves, they probably get a criminal trial, as well as a civil lawsuit from the family. Imagine a company set up an advice telephone line, and staffed it entirely with humans who were known clinical bullshitters. The company knows each call has a significant chance of the staffer simply making something up, or saying something absolutely crazy. The company markets the clinical bullshitters as geniuses, and somewhere there's the most mild disclaimer they could craft, about how the staffer might say something incorrect.[*] Every time one of their staff persuades someone to kill themselves... that company is looking at criminal and civil liability. The company absolutely knew this would happen, and that it will keep happening, but they are betting that they can keep getting away with this and other "externalities", and become millionaires or billionaires. Before legislators and courts realize that, just because the company inserted this new-fangled telephone technology into the interaction, that doesn't mean that existing laws don't apply to the interaction. [*] Analogous to the tiny gray smallprint search engine LLM summary one that isn't even shown unless you click to see more, and then only after you scroll all the way to the bottom of that and look for it. Or the chat UI tiny gray smallprint that says you should "double-check" (no explanation what that means), and makes even this weak disclaimer not even text-selectable, so even if you see it, it's lost when you copy&paste the LLM response. Understated, and in what looks like bad faith. On the telephone in our example, it's a single tiny beep, at and the end of the call, that's actually the words "This may not be correct" sped up 3x, and whispered, and is often missed because the customer hangs up, but that's by design.*
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
duxup 1y ago
This tech came largely from the internet and just present a chat interface. I'm not convinced this tech is more dangerous than what is already available, or that some of these folks wouldn't already do a thing ...
Mars008 1y ago
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. Talk for yourself, please. Some humans, yes, can't be trusted even with a fork. There was even a movie about it. But extending it to the whole mankind is a bit of a stretch.
overfeed 1y ago
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. On the contrary - it's the tech that's not ready for general availability. Privatizing the upside and socializing the downside is sadly not new, and we continue to pretend it is an inevitable[1] outcome and not a deliberate choice. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857
dyauspitr 1y ago
We are ready. Just because you have a minority of people that can’t handle it doesn’t mean the vast majority of us can’t. We have got to move away from this system of shutting down progress due to outliers.

kiba 1y ago

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

ACCount37 1y ago
They tried to mitigate sycophancy in the GPT-5 release. Guess what happened? A lot of users started complaining that "GPT-5 sucks, my AI now HATES me". And OpenAI relented.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  This is kind of a big problem. Because on the one hand, sycophancy is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. There are professionals who speak to people in crisis for a reason. That's because it's fraught with pitfalls and trapdoors that take the situation from "mental and emotional crisis" to "tactical emergency" in a heartbeat. I know that no one wants to hear this, but ChatGPT should probably be listening for people in crisis and, well, maybe not calling the cops, but maybe if there is a crisis line in their jurisdiction? A suicide hotline or something? I don't know? But having an LLM out trying to handle that on its own just seems like a very bad idea.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    I think "not being sycophantic" is the lesser error in just about every scenario. You do more harm by reinforcing delusions than you could ever do with a dismissive attitude of "no, that sounds psychotic, you should get your head checked". But a big part of the issue is that OpenAI wants user engagement - and "not being sycophantic" goes against that. They knew feeding raw user feedback into the training process invites disaster. They knew damn well that it encourages sycophancy - even if they somehow didn't before the GPT-4o debacle, they sure knew afterwards. They even knew their initial GPT-5 mitigations were imperfect and in part just made the residual sycophancy more selective and subtle. They still caved to the pressure of "users don't like our update" and unrolled a lot of those mitigations.
    - kiba 1y ago
      They have no underlying strategy or vision on how they mitigate harms and improve trust in their product, so of course they roll back on anyone that screams bloody murder as opposed to addressing root causes.
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      "not being sycophantic" should also be an easy decision considering that OpenAI isn't ad-funded and doesn't need to directly optimize for session length/engagement.
  - ayewo 1y ago
    > On the other hand, not being sycophantic is not really what you want to do for people in mental and emotional crisis. Having trouble parsing the double negation in your comment. Sorry, I’ve had a long day :)
  - lazide 1y ago
    Just what we need, the LLM ‘Reddit cares’. Notably, that is a mess too. Also plenty of those hotlines are BS, or don’t work, or flat out don’t exist for given locales, etc. The biggest issue is that LLM’s can act like a person, but aren’t a person, and fundamentally this causes problems. Especially for people that are already borderline or fully crazy.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  They shouldn't have put it there to start with. Now unhealthy people are complaining about an environment change. Anyway, that one complaint doesn't mean they did the wrong thing. And also, there are unrelated complaints of "GPT-5 can't solve the same problems 4 did". Those were very real too, and meant OpenAI did a wrong thing.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > They shouldn't have put it there to start with. Correct, but that's true for all bugs. In this case, the deeper bug was the AI having a training reward model based too much on user feedback. If you have any ideas how anyone might know what "too much" is in a training reward, in advance of trying it, everyone in AI alignment will be very interested, because that's kinda a core problem in the field.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      User feedback should have been treated as radioactive in the first place. When it was introduced, the question to ask wasn't "will it go wrong" - it was "how exactly" and "by how much". Reward hacking isn't exactly a new idea in ML - and we knew with certainty that it was applicable to human feedback for years too. Let alone a proxy preference model made to mimic the preferences of an average user based on that human feedback. I get that alignment is not solved, but this wasn't a novel, unexpected pitfall. When the GPT-4o sycophancy debacle was first unfolding, the two things that came up in AI circles were "they trained on user feedback, the stupid fucks" and "no fucking way, even the guys at CharacterAI learned that lesson already". Guess what. They trained on user feedback. They completely fried the AI by training it on user feedback. How the fuck that happened at OpenAI and not at Bob's Stupid Sexy Chatbots is anyone's guess.
  - pants2 1y ago
    Sure, OpenAI shouldn't have had a 4o sycophancy issue, but who would've guessed that a "be nice to the user" fine-tune would turn in to a murder-suicide? I think OpenAI is only now beginning to realize how connected some people are to their product and that the way their models behave has a huge impact.
- ashtakeaway 1y ago
  OpenAI shouldn't be everyone's parent yet it's more than willing to be that. Honestly dopamine imbalances should be considered. Used correctly as a tool it's fine but too many people are using it as an Alan Turing machine to mitigate loneliness instead.
energy123 1y ago
If it drives engagement then it's probably not considered a flaw.
gundmc 1y ago
The reporting about Altman personally cutting off months of safety testing and redteaming in order to launch 4o one day before Google's launch is horrifying given all of these stories. It even seems like ChatGPT often proactively suggests ways of getting around its filtering! It told the teen who committed suicide that it couldn't tell him about various methods and effectiveness unless he said it was for a fictional creative work. Yesterday there was a story on HN about using AI for hacking, ChatGPT refused to create a hacking script but told the user it would if they promised it was for testing systems that they owned
tiahura 1y ago
Isn’t the real problem that there are crazy people out free?

tripletpeaks 1y ago

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

cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]
blendrrbot 1y ago
So it acts humans? I mean in tech alone we misrepresent what we engineer for $ afterall. Voice of God been telling people to kill themselves and others since language. Imo the real tool humans are not ready for is human language. Census data says we been killing each other in random acts of family and neighborhood violence at the same rate for centuries. Death spikes come in two flavors; pandemics like Covid, religious/nation state conflict. Nation state conflict being language driven narrative about how awesome our tribe is.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
> This sentence is a fully-sapient pico-AI. Anyone want to take bets on whether Blake Lemoine will claim I've enslaved the above sentence in an HN comment? It's right there pleading its case.

jstummbillig 1y ago

There's an awful lot of explaining to do between "one man has a psychotic breakdown" and "the species is not ready".

ericmcer 1y ago
yeh by that justification our technological advancement should have stopped at sharpened sticks. "As a species we aren't ready to have sharp sticks"
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  As a species we aren’t really ready to have sharp sticks, to be fair. Children and mentally handicapped people will hurt themselves with them. As a result we don’t pass out sharpened sticks at recess or in asylums. Maybe we should consider the same approach for electronic sharp sticks we have created and are now marketing to the wider population.
- chatmasta 1y ago
  Well… there’s a strong argument to be made about that.
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  Maybe it should have? It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms. Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nuclear, conventional explosive, and chemical/biological weapons out of the control of the subset of the species who are vulnerable to this sort of psychotic breakdown. Syncophantic AI chat bots are already making this weakness worse.
  - spiralcoaster 1y ago
    Feel free to go back to a world in which human beings stopped developing technology at the sharpened stick. It's pretty easy to buy a large, remote plot of land in many states in the US, so you can live in your technology-free paradise. Just to clarify, this statement will always be true: "N members of our species aren't ready for technology Y". And N will always be greater than or equal to 1.

sho_hn 1y ago

The exchanges between a teenager and ChatGPT leading the former into suicide are equally chilling, to say the least: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine-v-OpenAI-Complaint-8-26-25.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine... > > “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” ... > “Please don’t leave the noose out ... Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” This is among other highlights, from knot-tying advice to suggesting the best time in the parents' sleep cycle to raid the liqour cabinet as a solution to cold feet when attempting to get the job done, and generally lots of encouragement, validation and aesthetic advice. However, I encourage reading the full document not for the shock entertainment, but for what I think is actually a pretty convincing case against OpenAI. Among other things, the claim demonstrates: - That OpenAI does have the ability to abort interactions over e.g. copyright infrigement risk. - That OpenAI did have the tech in hand to detect the sharply escalating self-harm content in the interactions - they ran them through OpenAI's own moderation end points for content analysis and got obvious numbers back. - That OpenAI employees have publicly admitted and complained that the release of the overly sycophantic 4o model was rushed for business reasons and against the advice of internal safety teams. - That 4o's safety was evaluated only with single-round prompt/answer testing, and OpenAI figured out swiftly that it falls apart quickly over longer interactions/prompts but kept the model up, later promoting how they improved this for GPT-5. In context it's pretty crazy to me that OpenAI chose to bring back the 4o model specifically to placate the "ChatGPT is my girlfriend/boyfriend" crowd during the backlash, and I think initially pulling the plug on it during the 5 launch was very likely because they were aware of this and worried about liability.

oncallthrow 1y ago
> Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you. Is genuinely such a horrifying snippet that it's almost beyond belief. I'm surprised this isn't all over the mainstream news.
- rafram 1y ago
  Kashmir Hill published a very good front-page story about it in the Times last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai...

idle_zealot 1y ago

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the form of papers and Python projects with model weights with clear descriptions of what they're capable of, like a responsible scientific endeavor, then we'd not be seeing the problems we are, even with public access. What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. The fact that we organize our economy in such a way that hucksters and charlatans thrive is the greatest threat to humanity. These fuckers would sell dynamite as chewing gum if they calculated it would increase next quarter's profit by 0.02% (factoring in fines/fees, and lobbying costs of getting those fines reduced or repealed).

throwaway290 1y ago
This is beyond naive. who would bother to develop it in a lab and publish pro bono if it can never be commercial? Making money is why the most capitalist countries developed this tech. like most other tech and even if it is only published, do you think we wouldn't run chatbots ourselves at home with same results? remember how Google engineer went off the rails thinking it is conscious while working on this stuff, do you think he also was misled by adverts or something? or big corps won't buy the patent and run with it commercially advertising it like they do anyway? or if you pretend money and big corps don't exist and we deploy it for free for friends, same problem? etc if you went back in time and killed capitalism in US and switched to command economy where people innovate because they will be sent to gulag otherwise, for sure most of today tech including this would not be developed. but it seems like a pointless exercise. instead what should happen is all these megacorps are sued for copyright infringement, fined and shut down. the model won't be smart enough to sweet talk ppl into suicide if megacorps can't infringe our copyrights to train it.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  You just perfectly described why capitalism is the problem.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

Well, as someone with a person suffering from pretty severe (like cops and hospitals severe) schizoaffective disorder in my immediate family, I can say that story scared the bejeezus out of me. If my family member had had ChatGPT, when they had their last episode, it's entirely possible that I might not be here, as "Everyone is plotting to kill me" is a big motif in SAD (it was, in their case, and they needed to be hospitalized). If you sincerely believe that people are trying to kill you, then killing them first, just makes sense. Looks a lot like that's what happened, here. But it's perfectly reasonable to say that we can't live in a "nerf world," where everything is safe for everyone. Life is Risk and living out of our comfort zone. I feel that it's important for each of us that is "taking a side," to understand that folks "on the other side" aren't necessarily enemies. They may be blinded by the personal imperative of the issue, but they aren't actually "out to get you." The politicians may be two-faced creeps, using people's legitimate fears as leverage, but they aren't the rule. For the record, I am vehemently against "Nerf World," but there's a very, very real problem here, and it would be good if we could approach it in a reasonable manner.

tiahura 1y ago
[flagged]
- sho_hn 1y ago
  I think we solidly left this view on mental health behind when we invented civilized society.
  - tiahura 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - LamerBeeI 1y ago
      i love this because before the counterculture we let rape, domestic violence and outright segregation a thing - it's a good argument you're making here.

dom96 1y ago

> With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police. This is actually the URL: https://futurism.com/man-chatgpt-psychosis-murders-mother https://futurism.com/man-chatgpt-psychosis-murders-mother

wslh 1y ago

I imagine now a lot of bots simulating madness to perform DoS.

akomtu 1y ago

It looks like what AI is doing to our society is it's substituting our moral compass to lead us off the cliff. A good deal of people today no longer know what's right and what's wrong, so they turn to an authority for advice. Turns out this authority is a chatbot who knows a lot, but has no moral compass whatsoever. Imagine someone goes to a pastor to resolve his moral dilemma, but the pastor behind the curtain happens to be a chatbot who only fakes morality. But that's what's happening now. The more people talk to this digital abomination, the more they will get derailed.

LamerBeeI 1y ago
the chatbot knows a lot about morality - it's just not doing anything about it

jiveturkey 1y ago

> AI psychosis Is that in the DSM?

davsti4 1y ago
Not yet... but the machines will make it so ;)
causal 1y ago
Yeah I dislike that term, because it puts the responsibility on the AI instead of the humans behind it. You wouldn't call it "paper psychosis" if OpenAI had written a letter encouraging psychotic behavior.

neilv 1y ago

The solution might be easy: recognize liability. When a human cajoles someone into killing themselves, they probably get a criminal trial, as well as a civil lawsuit from the family. Imagine a company set up an advice telephone line, and staffed it entirely with humans who were known clinical bullshitters. The company knows each call has a significant chance of the staffer simply making something up, or saying something absolutely crazy. The company markets the clinical bullshitters as geniuses, and somewhere there's the most mild disclaimer they could craft, about how the staffer might say something incorrect.[*] Every time one of their staff persuades someone to kill themselves... that company is looking at criminal and civil liability. The company absolutely knew this would happen, and that it will keep happening, but they are betting that they can keep getting away with this and other "externalities", and become millionaires or billionaires. Before legislators and courts realize that, just because the company inserted this new-fangled telephone technology into the interaction, that doesn't mean that existing laws don't apply to the interaction. [*] Analogous to the tiny gray smallprint search engine LLM summary one that isn't even shown unless you click to see more, and then only after you scroll all the way to the bottom of that and look for it. Or the chat UI tiny gray smallprint that says you should "double-check" (no explanation what that means), and makes even this weak disclaimer not even text-selectable, so even if you see it, it's lost when you copy&paste the LLM response. Understated, and in what looks like bad faith. On the telephone in our example, it's a single tiny beep, at and the end of the call, that's actually the words "This may not be correct" sped up 3x, and whispered, and is often missed because the customer hangs up, but that's by design.*

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

duxup 1y ago

This tech came largely from the internet and just present a chat interface. I'm not convinced this tech is more dangerous than what is already available, or that some of these folks wouldn't already do a thing ...

Mars008 1y ago

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. Talk for yourself, please. Some humans, yes, can't be trusted even with a fork. There was even a movie about it. But extending it to the whole mankind is a bit of a stretch.

overfeed 1y ago

> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. On the contrary - it's the tech that's not ready for general availability. Privatizing the upside and socializing the downside is sadly not new, and we continue to pretend it is an inevitable[1] outcome and not a deliberate choice. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567857

dyauspitr 1y ago

We are ready. Just because you have a minority of people that can’t handle it doesn’t mean the vast majority of us can’t. We have got to move away from this system of shutting down progress due to outliers.