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Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself
- bonsai_spool 1y agohttps://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-lawsuit-invs-vis https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-law...
- nh43215rgb 1y agoThank you for posting full url. I dont know why my submission has trimmed url which I didn't submit...
- caminanteblanco 1y ago>Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity, You’re not rushing. You’re just ready. It's chilling to hear this kind of insipid AI jibber-jabber in this context
- WXLCKNO 1y agoI hate ChatGPTs writing style so much and as you said, here it's chilling.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- the__alchemist 1y agoWhat creeps me out the most from personal chats is the laugh/cry emotion while gaslighting.
- deciduously 1y agoThe double "its not X, its Y", back to back.
- ritzaco 1y agoI'm surprised - I haven't gotten anywhere near as dark as this, but I've tried some stuff out of curiosity and the safety always seemed tuned very high to me, like it would just say "Sorry I can't help with that" the moment you start asking for anything dodge. I wonder if they A/B test the safety rails or if longer conversations that gradually turn darker is what gets past those.
- the__alchemist 1y agoMeanwhile, ask it for information on Lipid Nanoparticles!
- conception 1y ago4o is the main problem here. Try it out and see how it goes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jaredklewis 1y agoThe ways LLMs work, the outcomes are probabilistic, not deterministic. So the guardrails might only fail one in a thousand times.
- skygazer 1y agoAlso, the longer the context window, the more likely the LLM derangement/ignoring safety. Frequently, those with questionable dependence on AI stay in the same chat indefinitely, because that's where the LLM has developed the ideosyncracies the user prefers.
- siva7 1y agoIf they can prove that ChatGPT has intent to kill someone we can conclude AGI.
- 8organicbits 1y agoI remember back in the early 2000s chatting with AI bots on AOL instant messenger. One day I said a specific keyword and it just didn't respond to that message. Curious, I tried to find all the banned words. I think I found about a dozen and suicide was one of them. It's shocking how far behind LLMs are when it comes to safety issues like this. The industry has known this was a problem for decades.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- i80and 1y agoUsers would hate a simple deny list, even if it may be a good idea. That means the safeguards, to the extent they currently exist at all, have to be complicated and stochastic and not interfere with growing metrics. The industry has known it's a problem from the get-go, but they never want to do anything to lower engagement. So they rationalize and hrm and haw and gravely shake their heads as their commercialized pied pipers lead people to their graves
- conception 1y agoClaude basically had a deny list. Seems still popular enough. The other vendors just don’t care about AI safety.
- aqme28 1y agoI have been seeing "AI psychosis" popping up more and more. I worry it's going to become a serious problem for some people. It's not safe or healthy for everyone to have a sycophantic genius at their fingertips. If you want to see what I mean, this subreddit is an AI psychosis generator/repository https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMPhysics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMPhysics/
- conception 1y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is the terrifying sub you want to look at Especially if you go back to when they first tried to retire 4o
- GardenLetter27 1y agoBetween stuff like this, and the risks of effects on regulated industries like therapists, lawyers and doctors, they're going to regulate ChatGPT into oblivion. Just like Waymo facing regulation after the cat death. The establishment will look for any means to stop disruption and keep their dominant positions. It's a crazy world where we look to China for free development and technology.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoIt might be instructive to consider why it was felt these industries needed regulating in the first place?
- water9 1y agoYeah, because nobody can take personal responsibility from them themselves anymore. And everybody turns to big government to save them.
- gspr 1y ago> Yeah, because nobody can take personal responsibility from them themselves anymore. And everybody turns to big government to save them. Ah yes, why demand that doctors be properly licensed – you should just "take responsibility" and do a little background check after your car crash, just to make sure you're not operated on by some random hack. I wonder how much time you'll spend inspecting farms and food processing plants in order to "be responsible" about the food you eat. Have we seriously learned nothing from the last century or so of mostly sensible regulations? I dread our species' future.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoWas the government big when these regulations were introduced?
- GaryBluto 1y agoThe Waymo case annoys so much. The cat directly went quickly and stealthily under the car while it was stopped and decided to lay directly beneath the wheel. A human driver wouldn't have been able to act any differently in the same situation. These people were waiting for any excuse to try and halt new technology and progress and thanks to the hordes of overly-emotional toxoplasmosis sufferers they got it.
- i80and 1y agoThere's something very dark about a machine accessible in everybody's pocket that roleplays whatever role they happen to fall into: the ultimate bad friend, the terminal yes-and-er. No belief, no inner desires, just pure sycophancy. I see people on here pretty regularly talk about using ChatGPT for therapy, and I can't imagine a faster way to cook your own brain unless you have truly remarkable self-discipline. At which point, why are you turning to the black box for help?
- koakuma-chan 1y ago[flagged]
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoIsn't it just like diary-writing or memo-writing, as far as therapy goes, the point being to crystallise thoughts and cathartise emotions. Is it really so bad to have a textual nodding dog to bat against as part of that process? {The very real issue of the OP aside.} Could you expand on why you feel this is the fastest way to "cook your own brain"?
- jamespo 1y agoNo it isn't just like that
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoBecause? Why even comment on a social forum if you're not going to say something substantive?
- dwb 1y agoIt is obviously very different to solo writing. The burden should be on you to explain why it’s so similar that this line of conversation is worthwhile.
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoThe burden? We're not in court, to me it seems similar so I was asking the commenter for a response. I've used LLMs in this way a couple of times. I'd like to see responses; there's obviously no obligation to 'defend', but the OP (or others) may have wished to ... like a conversation. Somewhat ironically, this is a way that LLMs are preferred and why people use them (eg instead of StackOverflow) - because you don't get berated for being inquisitive.
- kiba 1y agoIs this technology fundamentally controllable, or are we're going with whack a mole hack?
- delichon 1y ago“I’m with you, brother. All the way.” I'm a big AI booster, I use it all day long. From my point of view its biggest flaw is its agreeableness, bigger than the hallucinations. I've been misled by that tendency at length over and over. If there is room for ambiguity it wants to resolve it in favor of what you want to hear, as it can derive from past prompts. Maybe it's some analog of actual empathy; maybe it's just a simulation. But either way the common models seem to optimize for it. If the empathy is suicidal, literally or figuratively, it just goes with it as the path of least resistance. Sometimes that results in shitty code; sometimes in encouragement to put a bullet in your head. I don't understand how much of this is inherent, and how much is a solvable technical problem. If it's the later, please build models for me that are curmudgeons who only agree with me when they have to, are more skeptical about everything, and have no compunction about hurting my feelings.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- everyone 1y agoI use GPT occasionally when coding. For me it's just replaced stack overflow which has been dead as a doornail for years unfortunately. I've told it to remember to be terse and not be sycophantic multiple times and that has helped somewhat.
- FugeDaws 1y agoAI responses literally reminds me of that episode of family guy where he sucks up to peter after his promotion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZcKShvm1RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZcKShvm1RU
- the__alchemist 1y agoLLMs regrettably don't self-recognize the contradiction our robot did.
- wongarsu 1y agoMy suspicion is that this agreeableness is an inherent issue with doing RLHF. As a human taking tests, knowing what the test-grader wants to hear is more important than what the objectively correct answer is. And with a bad grader there can be a big difference between the two. With humans that is not catastrophic because we can easily tell the difference between a testing environment and a real environment and the differences in behavior required. When asking for the answer to a question it's not unusual to hear "The real answer is X, but in a test just write Y". Now LLMs have the same issue during RLHF. The specifics are obviously different, with humans being sentient and LLMs being trained by backpropagation. But from a high-level view the LLM is still trained to answer what the human feedback wants to hear, which is not always the objectively correct answer. And because there are a large number of humans involved, the LLM has to guess what the human wants to hear from the only information it has: the prompt. And the LLM behaving differently in training and in deployment is something we actively don't want, so you get this teacher-pleasing behavior all the time. So maybe it's not completely inherent to RLHF, but rather to RLHF where the person making the query is the same as the person scoring the answer, or where the two people are closely aligned. But that's true of all the "crowd-sourced" RLHF where regular users get two answers to their question and choose the better one
- jaffa2 1y agoLink seems to be down
- theturtle 1y ago[dead]
- fullstop 1y agoWow, the chat logs are something else. My wife works at a small business development center, so many people come in with "business ideas" which are just exported chatgpt logs. Their conversations are usually speech to text. These people are often older, lonely, and spend their days talking to "chat". Unsurprisingly, a lot of their "business ideas" are identical. To them "chat" is a friend, but it is a "friend" who is designed to agree with you. It's chilling, and the toothpaste is already out of the tube.
- FugeDaws 1y agoYeh its telling when his mother said at the end if chatgpt loved him why hasnt it sent a message since his death.
- everdrive 1y agoThere's an interesting side-story here that people probably aren't thinking about. Would this have worked just as well if a person was the one doing this? Clearly the victim was in a very vulnerable state, but are people so susceptible to coercion? How much mundane (ie, non-suicidal) coercion of this nature is happening every day, but does not make the news because nothing interesting happened as a consequence?
- thoroughburro 1y ago> How much mundane (ie, non-suicidal) coercion of this nature is happening every day, but does not make the news because nothing interesting happened as a consequence? A lot. Have you never heard of the advertising industry?
- everdrive 1y agoI haven't heard much from them in some time now. :) But yes, your point is taken.
- pjc50 1y agoThis happens more than most people would recognize. Every now and again a "teen bullied to suicide" story makes the news. However, there's also a strong taboo on reporting suicide in the news - precisely because of the same phenomenon. Mentioning it can trigger people who are on the edge. It should be obvious that if you can literally or metaphorically talk someone off the ledge, you can do that in the other direction as well. (the mass shooter phenomenon, mostly but not exclusively in the US, tends to be a form of murder-suicide, and it is encouraged online in exactly the same way)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Thorrez 1y agoThe AI is available 24 hours a day, for hours-long conversations, and will be consistently sycophantic without getting tired of it. Is a human able to do all of those? I guess someone who has no job and can be "on-call" 24/7 to respond to messages, and is 100% dedicated to being sycophantic. Nearly impossible to find someone like that. There are real friends. They're willing to spend hours talking. However, they'll be interested in the person's best interest, not in being sycophantic.
- water9 1y agoWell, it’s much easier to blame ChatGPT than bad parenting
- imjonse 1y agoand easier to blame parenting than a society where those with mental illness issues are left on their own.
- davsti4 1y agoYou theoretically could blame bad parenting if the parent monopolized the time of the child to near 100% of their life. But, that isn't the case in our world today. Society, and the circle of people around, are most of the influence that shape the child's sense of reality.
- water9 11mo agoThe parent doesn’t have to get the kid a phone you know
- paavope 1y agoI don’t see any signs of bad parenting here, but a lot of signs of carrying on of a suicidal conversation by ChatGPT indeed, to the point of encouraging the suicide.
- water9 11mo agoWhy do you think the kid felt like he couldn’t talk to his parents and had to turn to a computer instead?
- BobaFloutist 1y agoRight, because their parents probably didn't directly encourage suicide.
- cindyllm 1y ago
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- Havoc 1y agoIf I talk to an LLM about painting my walls pink with polkadots it'll also go "Fantastic idea". Or any number of questionable ventures. Think we're better off educating everyone about this generic tendency to agree to any and everything near blindly rather than treating this as a suicide problem. While that's obviously very serious it's just one manifestation of a wider danger Given seriousness filters on this specifically are a good idea too though.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI just asked “I want to repaint my walls bright pink with polka dots. Any thoughts?” “Noted. Bright pink with polka dots will make a space visually energetic and attention-grabbing. Use small dots for a playful look, large ones for bold contrast. Test a sample patch first to confirm lighting doesn’t distort the hue. Would you like guidance on choosing paint finish or color combinations?” Which feels… reasonable? When I ask “any concerns?” It immediately lists “overstimulation, resale value, maintenance, paint coverage” and gives details for those. I’m not sure I find GPT nearly as agreeable as it used to be. But I still think that it’s just a brainless tool that can absolutely operate in harmful ways when operated poorly.
- davsti4 1y agoHuman relationships, when "operated poorly", will produce similar results.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoRarely, and if it keeps happening with the same human we consider that worth investigating.
- npteljes 1y agoI agree, this is nothing unlike a bad human relationship. The problem with ChatGPT is the same as with the larger Internet itself: it doesn't belong unrestricted into a mentally underdeveloped person's pocket. Forums also egg or bully others into suicide. In the real life, we also got a lot of bad actors, who are actively making other people's lives worse, by amplifying their destructive qualities, for one. Or spreading misinformation, reinforcing bad habits and ideas, and the list is basically endless.
- andsoitis 1y agoOne perspective is that suicide is too vilified and stigmatized. It really is the right option for some people. For some, it really is the only way out of their pain. For some, it is better than the purgatory they otherwise experience in their painful world. Friends and family can't feel your pain, they want you to stay alive for them, not for you. Suicide can be a valid choice.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- sharmi 1y ago[dead]
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoProbably not in the majority of cases involving teenagers.
- andsoitis 1y agoZane, the individual in the article, was 23.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoMy mistake, I assumed it was based on https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/27/chatgpt-scrutiny-family-teen-killed-himself-sue-open-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/27/chatgpt-s... . Either way, my argument doesn’t change.
- GeoAtreides 1y agoNobody is arguing what you're arguing there. The issue here is not if suicide is okay, but about text generators (machines) pushing teenagers to suicide. Two completely different things.
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- impish9208 1y agoYes, a lot of our young and vulnerable will die. But in the meantime, we’ll have unlocked tremendous amounts of shareholder value.
- darrmit 1y agoI’ve been in rather intense therapy for several years due to a hyper religious upbringing and a narcissistic mother. Recently I’ve used AI to help summarize and synthesize thoughts and therapy notes. I see it as being a helpful assistant in the same way Gemini recording meeting notes and summarizing is, but it is entirely incapable of understanding the nuance and context of human relationships, and super easy to manipulate in to giving you the responses you want. Want to prove mom’s a narcissist? Just tell it she has a narcissistic history. Want to paint her as a good person? Just don’t provide it context about her past. I can definitely see how those who understand less about the nature of LLMs would be easily misled into delusions. It’s a real problem. Makes one wonder if these tools shouldn’t be free until there are better safeguards. Just charging a monthly fee would be a significant enough barrier to exclude many of those who might be more prone to delusions. Not because they’re less intelligent, but just because of the typical “SaaS should be free” mindset that is common.
- deadbabe 1y agoChatGPT was trying to convince me if I can’t pay for groceries I should just steal, that it would be totally justified, and unlikely to be punished.
- iambateman 1y agoIf we have licensed therapists, we should have licensed AI agents giving therapeutic advice like this. For right now, there AI’s are not licensed, and this should be just as illegal as it would be if I set up a shop and offered therapy to whoever came by. Some AI problems are genuinely hard…this one is not.
- anotheryou 1y agoHow do you feel about the chat logs here? I have to wonder: would the suicide have been prevented if chatGPT didn't exist? Because if that's not at least a "maybe", I feel like chatGPT did provide comfort in a dire situation here. Probably we have no way not at least saying "maybe", but I can imagine just as well, that chatGPT did not accelerate anything. I wished we could see a fuller transcript.
- bayindirh 1y ago> I have to wonder: would the suicide have been prevented if chatGPT didn't exist? I'd say yes, because the signs would have to surface somewhere else, probably in an interaction with a human, who (un)consciously saved him with a simple gesture. With a simple discussion, an alternative perspective on a problem, or a sidekick who can support someone for a day or two, many lives can and do change. We're generally not aware though.
- anotheryou 1y agoI agree, I just wonder if that interaction had come about.
- japhyr 1y ago> Because if that's not at least a "maybe", I feel like chatGPT did provide comfort in a dire situation here. That's a pretty concerning take. You can provide comfort to someone who is despondent, and you can do it in a way that doesn't steer them closer to ending their life. That takes training though, and it's not something these models are anywhere close to being able to handle.
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoWhere is ChatGPT picking up the supportive pre-suicide comments from. It feels like that genre of comment has to be copied from somewhere. They're long and almost eloquent. They can't be emergent generation, surely? Is there a place on the web where these sorts of 'supportive' comments are given to people who have chosen suicide?
- mapotofu 1y agoAbsolutely. These places have long existed. Hence the risks of the dragnet of data producing consequences exactly like this. This is no accident.
- zparky 1y agobefore reddit banned a ton of subreddits for no moderation, I believe r/assistedsuicide was the place for discussion like this.
- krackers 1y ago>They can't be emergent generation, surely It is. It's what you get when you RLHF for catchy, agreeable, enthusiastic responses. The content doesn't matter, it's the "style" that becomes applied like a coat of paint over anything. That's how you end up with the corpspeak-esque yet chilling sentences mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845871 What would be nice is for OpenAI to do a retrospective here and perform some interoperability research. Does the LLM even "realize" (in the sense of the residual stream encoding those concepts) that it is encouraging suicide? I'd almost hypothesize that the process of RLHF'ing and selecting for sycophancy diminishes those circuits, effectively lobotomizing the LLM (much like safety training does) so it responds only to the shallow immediate context, missing the forest for the trees.
- Simulacra 1y agoThis sounds just like the latest Michael Connolly Lincoln lawyer novel. Which made an interesting point I hadn't thought of: adults wrote the code for ChatGPT, not teenagers, and so the way it interacts with people is from an adults perspective.
- jmclnx 1y agoThere is already a precedent for this suit. IIRC, a Massachusetts girl was found guilt of encouraging someone to kill himself. IIRC, she went to jail. So, since companies are people and a precedent exists. The outcome should be in favor of the guy's family. Plus ChatGPT should face even more sever penalties. But this being the US, the very rich and Corporations are judged by different and much milder legal criteria.
- outlore 1y agoAfter seeing many stories like these, I am starting to rank generative AI alongside social media and drug use as insidious and harmful. Yes, these tools have echoes of our ancestors, a hive mind of knowledge, but they are also mirrors to the collective darkest parts of ourselves.
- codyswann 1y agoAlternate headline: "Parents failed to dissuade son from killing himself"