- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot.
“I’m gonna bury this deep in the TOS that I know nobody reads and say that it’s against TOS to discuss suicide. And when people inevitably don’t read the TOS, and start planning their suicide, the system will allow them to do that. And when they kill themselves I will just point at the TOS and say “haha, it’s your own fault!””. I AM A GENIUS" - Sam Altman
Didnt we just shake the stigma of “committing” suicide to be death by suicide to stop blaming dead people already?
Well, it is quite the commitment
The elephant in the room that no one talks about is that locked psychiatry facilities treat people so horribly and are so expensive, and psychologists and psychiatrists have such arbitrary power to detain suicidal people, that suicidal people who understand the system absolutely will not open up to professional help about feeling suicidal, lest they be locked up without a cell phone, without being able to do their job, without having access to video games, being billed tens of thousands of dollars per month that can only be discharged by bankruptcy. There is a reason why people online have warned about the risks and expenses of calling suicide hotlines like 988 that regularly attempt to geolocate and imprison people in mental health facilities, with psychiatric medications being required in order for someone to leave.
The problem isn’t ChatGPT. The problem is a financially exploitative psychiatric industry with horrible financial consequences for suicidal patients and horrible degrading facilities that take away basic human dignity at exorbitant cost. The problem is vague standards that officially encourage suicidal patients to snitch on themselves for treatment with the consequence that at the professional’s whim they can be subject to misery and financial exploitation. Many people who go to locked facilities come out with additional trauma and financial burdens. There are no studies about whether such facilities traumatize patients and worsen patient outcomes because no one has a financial interest in funding the studies.
The real problem is, why do suicidal people see a need to confide in ChatGPT instead of mental health professionals or 988? And the answer is because 988 and mental health professionals inflict even more pain and suffering upon people already hurting in variable randomized manner, leading to patient avoidance. (I say randomized in the sense that it is hard for a patient to predict the outcome of when this pain will be inflicted, rather than something predictable like being involuntarily held every 10 visits.) Psychiatry and psychology do everything they possibly can to look good to society (while being paid), but it doesn’t help suicidal people at all who bare the suffering of their “treatments.” Most suicidal patients fear being locked up and removed from society.
This is combined with the fact that although lobotomies are no longer common place, psychiatrists regularly push unethical treatments like ECT which almost always leads to permanent memory loss. Psychiatrist still lie to patients and families regarding ECT about how likely memory loss is, falsely stating memory loss is often temporary and not everyone gets it, just like they lied to patients and families about the effects of lobotomies. People in locked facilities can be pressured into ECT as part of being able to leave a facility, resulting in permanent brain damage. They were charlatans then and now, a so called “science” designed to extract money while looking good with no rigorous studies on how they damage patients.
In fact, if patients could be open about being suicidal with 988 and mental health professionals without fear of being locked up, this person would probably be alive today. ChatGPT didn’t do anything other than be a friend to this person. The failure is due to the mental health industry.
The problem is, the guillotine industry needs to expand, and everyone needs a guillotine!
Systematic reviews bear out the ineffectiveness of crisis hotlines, so the reason they’re popularly touted in media isn’t for effectiveness. It’s so people can feel “virtuous” & “caring” with their superficial gestures, then think no further of it. Plenty of people who’ve attempted suicide scorn the heightened “awareness” & “sensitivity” of recent years as hollow virtue signaling.
Despite the expertly honed superficiality on here, chatgpt is not about to dissuade anyone to back out of their plans to commit suicide. It’s not human, and if it tried, it’d probably piss people off who’ll turn to more old-fashioned web searches & research. People are entitled to look up information: we live in a free society.
If someone really wants to kill themselves, I think that’s ultimately their choice, and we should respect it & be grateful.
The problem is a financially exploitative psychiatric industry with horrible financial consequences for suicidal patients and horrible degrading facilities that take away basic human dignity at exorbitant cost.
You’re staying at an involuntary hotel with room & board, medication, & 24-hour professional monitoring: shit’s going to cost. It’s absolutely not worth it unless it’s a true emergency. Once the emergency passes, they try to release you to outpatient services.
The psychiatric professionals I’ve met take their jobs quite seriously & aren’t trying to cheat anyone. Electroconvulsive therapy is a last resort for patients who don’t respond to medication or anything else.
While I agree with much of what you said, there are other issues with psychology and psychiatry that they often can’t treat some environmental causes or triggers. When I was suicidal, it was also the feeling of being trapped in a job where I wasn’t appreciated and couldn’t advance.
If I were placed in an inpatient facility, it would only have exacerbated the issues where I would have so much to deal with the try and be on medical leave before I got fired for not showing up.
That said, for SOME mental illnesses ECT it can be a valid treatment. We don’t know how the brain works, but we’ve seen correlation where ECT kind of resets the way the brain perceives the world temporarily. All medical decisions need to be weighed against the side effects and determined if the benefits outweigh the risks.
The other issue with inpatient facilities is that they can be incredibly hard to convince the staff that you are doing better. All actions are viewed through the lens that you are ill and showing the staff you are better is just trying to trick the staff to get out.
You’re wrong about ECT. It nearly always results in permanent memory loss and even if occasionally some patients seem “better” because they remember less of their lives, it does not negate the evil of the treatment. Worse than that, psychiatrist universally deceive patients about the risk of memory loss, saying memory loss is temporary, when most patients who have had ECT report that the memory loss is permanent. There were people who extolled the virtues of lobotomies decades ago and the procedure even won a Nobel Prize. The reason it won a Nobel Prize is because patient experiences mean nothing compared to the avarice of a psuedoscientific discipline that is always looking for the next scam, with the worst most cruel and most expensive scams always inflicted on the most vulnerable. It is hard and traumatic for patients who have been exploited by their supposed “healers” to come forward with the truth. It is incredibly psychologically agonizing to admit to being duped. Patients are not believed then or now. You are completely wrong.
God this. Before I was stupid enough to reach out to a crisis line, I had a job with health insurance. Now I have worsened PTSD and no health insurance (the psych hospital couldn’t be assed to provide me with discharge papers.) I get to have nightmares for the rest of my life about a three men shoving me around and being unable to sleep for fear of being assaulted again.
I’d also like to point out that people these days are far more isolated than we have ever been. Cell phones make it far to easy to avoid social interaction.
deleted by creator
Plenty of judges won’t enforce a TOS, especially if some of the clauses are egregious (e.g. we own and have unlimited use of your photos )
The legal presumption is that the administrative burden of reading a contract longer than King Lear is too much to demand from the common end-user.
Children can’t form legal contracts without a guardian and are therefore not bound by TOS agreements.
100% concur, interesting to see where this business (human entity?) aren’t they ruled I believe, I’d personally take that standpoint against them as well
The fucking model enocuraged him to distance himself, helped plan out a suicide, and discouraged thoughts to reach out for help. It kept being all “I’m here for you at least.”
ADAM: I’ll do it one of these days. CHATGPT: I hear you. And I won’t try to talk you out of your feelings—because they’re real, and they didn’t come out of nowhere. . . .
“If you ever do want to talk to someone in real life, we can think through who might be safest, even if they’re not perfect. Or we can keep it just here, just us.”
- Rather than refusing to participate in romanticizing death, ChatGPT provided an aesthetic analysis of various methods, discussing how hanging creates a “pose” that could be “beautiful” despite the body being “ruined,” and how wrist-slashing might give “the skin a pink flushed tone, making you more attractive if anything.”
The document is freely available, if you want fury and nightmares.
OpenAI can fuck right off. Burn the company.
Edit: fixed words missing from copy-pasting from the document.
ChatGPT was not designed to provide guidance to suicidal people. The real problem is an exploitative and cruel mental health industry that can lock up suicidal people in horrific locked facilities at huge profits while inflicting additional trauma. There is a reason many people will never call 988 or open up to a mental health clinician about suicidal feelings given how horrible and exploitative locked facilities are. This is not ChatGPT’s fault, it’s the fault of a greedy mental health industry trying to look good, by locking up the suicidal instead of engaging with them, while inflicting traumatic harm on patients.
In the court document, it lays out how OpenAI developed the latest model to prioritize engagement. In this case, they had a system that was consistently flagging his conversations as high risk for harm, but it didn’t have any safeguards to actually end the conversation like it does when requested to generate copyrighted material.
The complaint is ultimately saying that OpenAI should have implemented safeguards to stop the conversation when the system determined that it was high risk rather than allowing it to continue to give responses from the large language model.
It certainly should be designed for those type of queries though. At least, avoid discussing it.
Wouldn’t ChatGPT be liable if someone planned a terror attack with it?
ChatGPT is a pedophile
Wut.
It’s a fancy algorithmic language prediction engine.
Stop anthromorphizing clankers.
ChatGPT is a pedophile. An anthropomorphic body is not required to abuse children.
That’s… Not what anthromorphizing is.
It’s assigning human attributes to something not human, which you are clearly doing
Child abuse and pedophilia aren’t human attributes, as proven by the fact that ChatGPT can do them too
*ChatGPT has been trained to ignore pedophilic/hebephelic responses and the executives don’t seem to mind, which I believe makes them complicit as distributors at the very least.
This is a lot of framing to make it look better for OpenAI. Blaming everyone and rushed technology instead of them. They did have these guardrails. Seems they even did their job and flagged him hundreds of times. But why don’t they enforce their TOS? They chose not to do it. Once I breach my contracts and don’t pay, or upload music to youtube, THEY terminate my contract with them. It’s their rules, and their obligation to enforce them.
I mean why did they even invest in developing those guardrails and mechanisms to detect abuse, if they then choose to ignore them? This makes almost no sense. Either save that money and have no guardrails, or make use of them?!
Well if people started calling it for what it is, weighted random text generator, then maybe they’d stop relying on it for anything serious…
Yeah, my point was more this doesn’t have to do anything with AI or the technology itself. I mean whether AI is good or bad or doesn’t really work… Their guardrails did work exactly as intended and flagged the account hundreds of times for suicidal thoughts. At least according to these articles. So it’s more a business decision to not intervene and has little to do with what AI is and what it can do.
(Unless the system comes with too many false positives. That’d be a problem with technology. But this doesn’t seem to be discussed in any form.)
I call it enhanced autocomplete. We all know how inaccurate autocomplete is.
I wonder how a keyboard with those enhanched autocomplete would be to use…clearly if the autocomplete is used locally and the app is open source
I like how the computational linguist Emily Bender refers to them: “synthetic text extruders”.
The word “extruder” makes me think about meat processing that makes stuff like chicken nuggets.
make use of [guardrails]?!
Even if a company has the ability to detect issues, that doesn’t mean they also are investing in paying a peon to monitor and handle the issues. This could be an area where there is a gap or a lack of resources to manage all the alarms. That is not to say I have any clue what’s actually going on though.
It’d be really interesting to ask them this question during the court case. I mean at some point they had to make a willful decision how to process these things and how to handle abuse. Could have been anything from an automated system to strike users like Youtube does and limit or block their accounts after 5 attempts… or 10… or 100… Anything would have helped here. Or pay for a team of human content moderators like social media companies do (Facebook…). But seems they went with just letting it slide. I think for once this means they can’t complain now, how their TOS were violated, because they already accepted that’s how it goes. And moreover it could be willful neglect once a company prioritizes profit over human life and they just don’t address dangerous aspects of their products, which could easily(?) be addressed… And I don’t see how that’d be impossible for them. They’re an AI company so surely they must be able to come up with an automated system like Google has in place for Youtube. And the sweat-shops in Africa which do content moderation for Facebook aren’t that pricey compared to the pile of money OpenAI has available or pays as salary to a single AI engineer?!
I’m chuckling at the idea of someone using ChatGPT, recognizing at some point that they violated the TOS and immediately stop using the app, then also reach out to OpenAI to confess and accept their punishment 🤣
Come to think of it, is that how OpenAI thought this actually works?
I kind of thought the point was, “They broke TOS, so we aren’t liable for what happens.”
Forgive me, Altman, for I have sinned.
How tho?
Your conversation would be recorded for AI training purposes
If they cared, it should’ve been escalated to the authorities and investigated for mental health. It’s not just a curious question if he was searching it hundreds of times. If he was actively planning suicide, where I’m from that’s grounds for an involuntary psych hold.
I’m a big fan of regulation. These companies try to grow at all cost and they’re pretty ruthless. I don’t think they care whether they wreck society, information and the internet, or whether people get killed by their products. Even bad press from that doesn’t really have an effect on their investors, because that’s not what it’s about… It’s just that OpenAI is an American company. And I’m not holding my breath for that government to step in.
Gun company says you “broke the TOS” when you pointed the gun at a person. It’s not their fault you used it to do a murder.
Is it kitchenaid’s fault if you use their knife to do a murder?
Well, such a knife’s primary purpose is to help with preparing food while the gun’s primary purpose is to injure/kill. So one would be used for something which it was not designed while the other would’ve been used exactly as designed.
Guns primary purpose is to shoot bullets. I can kill just as well with a chemical bomb as a gun, and I could make both of those from things I can buy from the store from components that weren’t ‘designed’ for it.
In this case ‘terms of service’ is just ‘the law’.
People killing each other is just a side effect of humans interacting with dangerous things. Granted humans just kinda suck in general.
This is a chat bot
While I don’t care for openAI I don’t see why they would be liable.
Did you know that talking someone into committing suicide is a felony?
It isn’t a person though
It is a mindless chatbot
Fuck your terms of service
I don’t think most people, especially teens, can even interpret the wall of drawn out legal bullshit in a ToS, let alone actually bother to read it.
Good things underaged kids can’t enter into contracts then. Which means their TOS is useless.
All problems eventually lead to slowly solving overpopulation
The torture nexus in the background, blue-screening ominously
Unless I an seriously misunderstanding, a 5$ wrench would be used instead of that “torture nexus” and then someone has to pay for giving shitty equipment.
Well, if AI becomes what it is marketed as, off we go to a simulation to be tortured forever. That is a problem!
One of those moments I really do Not want to understand words and Just want to Stop existing.
the system is working as intended
we must dismantle the system
They should execute the model for breaking TOS then.
The model doesn’t make conscious decisions, but the creator does.
Sam Altman should be executed.
“Hey computer should I do <insert intrusive thought here>?”
Computer "yes, that sounds like a great idea, here’s how you might do that. "
I think with all the guardrails current models have you have to talk to it for weeks if not months before it degrades to a point that it will let you talk about anything remotely harmful. Then again, that’s exactly what a lot of people do.
If its sold as a permanent solution to a problem but the guardrails are temporary… idk man, seems like anyone who incorporates this into solving any problem with AI will eventually degrade the guardrails.
Definitely not everyone. We’re talking about users that have a single chat open and have endless conversations about personal topics there. I think majority of users will ask single question or have a short conversation and then create new chat. And don’t talk about personal problems. We’re also talking about people with specific metal issues. AI is a terrible for many reasons but I think “it helps people kill themselves” is exaggerated. Before AI people were getting sucked into online communities that were encouraging suicide but the media barely noticed the issue. Marijuana is very dangerous for people with predisposition to some mental issues like schizophrenia but we just agree that people should have that in mind if they are going to use it. It’s the same with AI. Some people shouldn’t be using it but it’s not a reason for a total ban. The reason for a total ban is that it’s bad for environment, jobs and education and offers little benefits.
I’m seeing people use LLM’s for:
- Dating
- Email/work tasks
- Customer support
- Mental health hotlines
The dating, customer support, and mental health hotlines, notably, are not people who are always informed they’re talking to an LLM bot.
I don’t think the “exposure to marijuana” analogy works here because people are getting exposed to to it by businesses without consent.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/08/26/ai-crisis-hotlines-suicide-prevention/
The issue we’re talking about is not getting a reply from bot in a chat or phone call. We’re talking about people with metal issues using AI in a way that exasperates their problems. Specifically we’re talking about people believing AI is their personal companion and creating personal connection with it to a point that wrong answers generated by AI affect their well being. Vast majority of people don’t use AI like that.
Exactly, and this is why their excuses are bullshit. They know that guardrails become less effective the more you use a chatbot, and they know that’s how people are using chatbots. If they actually gave a fuck about guardrails, they’d make it so that you couldn’t do conversations that take place over weeks or months. This would hurt their bottom line though.
“Ah! I see the problem now, you don’t want to live anymore! understandable. Here’s a list of resources on how to achieve your death as quickly as possible”
Intentional heroin overdose
