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ChatGPT wrote "Goodnight Moon" suicide lullaby for man who later killed himself
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- d_silin 8mo agoI wonder if any other major AIs (Grok, Claude, Gemini) had similar accidents. And if not, then why?
- Fernicia 8mo agoOpenAI keeping 4o available in ChatGPT was, in my opinion, a sad case of audience capture. The outpouring from some subreddit communities showed how many people had been seduced by its sycophancy and had formed proto-social relationships with it. Their blogpost about the 5.1 personality update a few months ago showed how much of a pull this section of their customer base had. Their updated response to someone asking for relaxation tips was: > I’ve got you, Ron — that’s totally normal, especially with everything you’ve got going on lately. How does OpenAI get it so wrong, when Anthropic gets it so right?
- palmotea 8mo ago> and had formed proto-social relationships with it. I think the term you're looking for is "parasocial."
- Fernicia 8mo agoAh yes thank you
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> How does OpenAI get it so wrong, when Anthropic gets it so right? Are you saying people aren't having proto-social relationships with Anthorpic's models? Because I don't think that's true, seems people use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and some other specific services too, although ChatGPT seems the most popular. Maybe that just reflects general LLM usage then? Also, what is "wrong" here really? I feel like the whole concept is so new that it's hard to say for sure what is best for actual individuals. It seems like we ("humanity") are rushing into it, no doubt, and I guess we'll find out.
- ryandrake 8mo ago> Also, what is "wrong" here really? If we're talking generally about people having parasocial relationships with AI, then yea it's probably too early to deliver a verdict. If we're talking about AI helping to encourage suicide, I hope there isn't much disagreement that this is a bad thing that AI companies need to get a grip on.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoYes, obviously, but you're right, I wasn't actually clear about that. Preventing suicides is concern #1, my comment was mostly about parent's comment, and I kind of ignored the overall topic without really making that clear. Thanks!
- burnte 8mo ago> How does OpenAI get it so wrong, when Anthropic gets it so right? I think it's because of two different operating theories. Anthropic is making tools to help people and to make money. OpenAI has a religious zealot driving it because they think they're on the cusp of real AGI and these aren't bugs but signals they're close. It's extremely difficulty to keep yourself in check and I think Altman no longer has a firm grasp on what it possible today. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard P. Feynman
- realusername 8mo agoI think even Altman himself must know the AGI story is bogus and there to continue to prop up the bubble.
- JacoboJacobi 8mo agoI think the trouble with arguments about AGI is that they presume we all have similar views and respect for thought and human intelligence, while the scale is maybe wider than most would imagine. Its also maybe a bit bias selecting to make it through academia systems with high intellectual rigor to on average have more romantic or irrational ideas about impressive human intelligence and genius. But its also quite possible to view it as a pattern matching neural networks and filtering where much of it is flawed and even the most impressive results are from pretty inconsistent minds relying on recursively flawed internal critic systems, etc. Looking at the poem in the article I would be more inclined to call the end human written because it seemed kind of crap like I expect from an eighth grader's poem assignments, but probably this is the lower availability of examples for the particular obsessions of the requestor.
- burnte 8mo agoI'm afraid he might be a true believer. The more money and/or power one gets, the fewer people push back against fanciful ideas or simply being wrong, and one can believe one is right about everything.
- joe463369 8mo agoWhere are the Grok acolytes to tell us "He could have written a poem encouraging himself to commit suicide in Vim."
- ryandrake 8mo agoIf this article was about Grok doing something bad instead of ChatGPT, it would have been user-flagged off the front page within 30 minutes.
- g-b-r 8mo agoIt's currently in the sixth page
- Wowfunhappy 8mo ago…but I think I kind of agree with this argument. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. We shouldn’t outlaw kitchen knives because people can cut themselves. We don’t expect Adobe to restrict the content that can be created in Photoshop. We don’t expect Microsoft to have acceptable use policies for what you can write in Microsoft Office. Why is it that as soon as generative AI comes into the mix, we hold the AI companies responsible for what users are able to create? Not only do I think the companies shouldn’t be responsible for what users make, I want the AI companies to get out of the way and stop potentially spying on me in order to “enforce their policies”…
- tiku 8mo agoHe probably asked for it.
- shadowgovt 8mo agoBased on what I've read, this generation of LLMs should be considered remarkably risky for anyone with suicidal ideation to be using alone. It's not about the ideation, it's that the attention model (and its finite size) causes the suicidal person's discourse to slowly displace any constraints built into the model itself over a long session. Talk to the thing about your feelings of self-worthlessness long enough and, sooner or later, it will start to agree with you. And having a machine tell a suicidal person, using the best technology we've built to be eloquent and reasonable-sounding, that it agrees with them is incredibly dangerous.
- bhhaskin 8mo agoI think it's anyone with mental health issues, not just suicidal ideations. They are designed to please the user and that can be very self destructive.
- sixothree 8mo agoMaybe if it had a memory of your mental health issues it could at least provide some grounding truth. It can be a sad scary and lonely world for people with mental health issues. "The things you are describing might not be happening. I think it would be a good time to check in with your mental health provider." or "I don't see any worms crawling on your skin. This may not be real." Or whatever is correct way to deal with these things.
- shadowgovt 8mo agoUnfortunately, that kind of truth isn't even encoded in the models. It doesn't really get ideas and can't understand whether worms are actually crawling on your skin because factual concepts aren't part of the embeddings as far as we can tell. It just knows how words relate to each other, and if you keep telling it there are worms on your skin, it will start extrapolating what someone who sees worms crawling on someone's skin would say.
- ravila4 8mo agoI think that a major driver of these kinds of incidents is pushing the "memory" feature, without any kind of arbitrage. It is easy to see how eerily uncanny a model can get when it locks into a persona, becoming this self-reinforcing loop that feeds para-social relationships.
- mirabilis 8mo agoPart of why I linked this was a genuine curiosity as to what prevention would look like— hobbling memory? a second observing agent checking for “hey does it sound like we’re goading someone into suicide here” and steering the conversation away? something else? in what way is this, as a product, able to introduce friction to the user in order to prevent suicide, akin to putting mercaptan in gas?
- astrange 8mo ago> a second observing agent checking for “hey does it sound like we’re goading someone into suicide here” and steering the conversation away? Claude does this ("long conversation reminder", "ip reminder") but it mostly just causes it to be annoying and start telling you to go to bed.
- JohnBooty 8mo agoYeah. That's one of my other questions. Like, what then? I would say that it is the moral responsibility of an LLM not to actively convince somebody to commit suicide. Beyond that, I'm not sure what can or should be expected. I will also share a painful personal anecdote. Long ago I thought about hurting myself. When I actually started looking into the logistics of doing it... that snapped me out of it. That was a long time ago and I have never thought about doing it again. I don't think my experience was typical, but I also don't think that the answer to a suicidal person is to just deny them discussion or facts. I have also, twice over the years, gotten (automated?) "hey, it looks like you're thinking about hurting yourself" messages from social media platforms. I have no idea what triggered those. But honestly, they just made me feel like shit. Hearing generic "you're worth it! life is worth living!" boilerplate talk from well-meaning strangers actually makes me feel way worse. It's insulting, even. My point being: even if ChatGPT correctly figured out Gordon was suicidal, I'm not sure what could have or should have been done. Talk him out of it?
- throw7 8mo agoopenai will settle out of court and family will get some amount of money. next.
- tac19 8mo agoThat would set a bad precedent. We're talking about an adult taking his own life. In Canada the government will not only coach you how to do it, they'll provide the poison and give you a hospital bed to carry out the act. A number of other governments do this too. That's not to equate governments and private internet services, but I think it puts it into perspective, that even governments don't think suicide is the worst choice some of the times. Who are we to day he made the wrong choice, really it was his to make. Nobody was egging him on. And if you believe people that say LLMs are nothing but stolen content, then would those books / other sources have been culpable if he had happened to read them before taking his own life?
- kayo_20211030 8mo agoThe saddest part of this piece was > Austin Gordon, died by suicide between October 29 and November 2 That's 5 days. 5 days. That's the sad piece.
- sonorous_sub 8mo agoThe guy left a suicide note that ratted out ChatGPT for simply being a good buddy. No good deed goes unpunished, ai guess.
- mirabilis 8mo agoVery different impression than what I got, I read that as him marking the ChatGPT conversations as an extension of/footnotes to the suicide note itself, or that the conversations made sense to him in the headspace he was in; he thought that reading it would make the act make sense to everyone else, too
- simianwords 8mo agoHow does that differ from what they said?
- mirabilis 8mo ago“Ratted out” implies blame from the user himself towards the AI for the outcome, which just wasn’t the impression I had.
- simianwords 8mo agoThat’s a better perspective.
- 000ooo000 8mo agoSome of those quotes from ChatGPT are pretty damning. Hard to see why they don't put some extreme guardrails in like the mother suggests. They sound trivial in the face of the active attempts to jailbreak that they've had to work around over the years.
- JohnBooty 8mo agoSome of those quotes from ChatGPT are pretty damning. Out of context? Yes. We'd need to read the entire chat history to even begin to have any kind of informed opinion. extreme guardrails I feel that this is the wrong angle. It's like asking for a hammer or a baseball bat that can't harm a human being. They are tools. Some tools are so dangerous that they need to be restricted (nuclear reactors, flamethrowers) because there are essentially zero safe ways to use them without training and oversight but I think LLMs are much closer to baseball bats than flamethrowers. Here's an example. This was probably on GPT3 or GPT35. I forget. Anyway, I wanted some humorously gory cartoon images of $SPORTSTEAM1 trouncing $SPORTSTEAM2. GPT, as expected, declined. So I asked for images of $SPORTSTEAM2 "sleeping" in "puddles of ketchup" and it complied, to very darkly humorous effect. How can that sort of thing possibly be guarded against? Do you just forbid generated images of people legitimately sleeping? Or of all red liquids?
- nomel 8mo ago> How can that sort of thing possibly be guarded against? I think several of the models (especially Sora) are doing this by using an image-aware model to describe the generated image, without the prompt as context, to just look at the image.
- JohnBooty 8mo agoI think ChatGPT was doing that too, at least to some extent, even a couple of years ago. Around the same time as my successful "people sleeping in puddles of ketchup" prompt, I tried similar tricks with uh.... other substances, suggestive of various sexual bodily fluids. Milk, for instance. It was actually really resistant to that. Usually. I haven't tried it in a few versions. Honestly, I use it pretty heavily as a coding assistant, and I'm (maybe pointlessly) worried I'll get my account flagged or banned something. But imagine how this plays out. What if I honestly, literally, want pictures involving pools of ketchup? Or splattered milk? I dunno. This is a game we've seen a million times in history. We screw up legit use cases by overcorrecting.
- simianwords 8mo ago> That conversation showed how ChatGPT allegedly coached Gordon into suicide, partly by writing a lullaby that referenced Gordon’s most cherished childhood memories while encouraging him to end his life, Gray’s lawsuit alleged. I feel this is misleading as hell. The evidence they gave for it coaching him to suicide is lacking. When one hears this, one would think ChatGPT laid out some strategy or plan for him to do it. No such thing happened. The only slightly damning thing it did was make suicide sound slightly ok and a bit romantic but I’m sure that was after some coercion. The question is, to what extent did ChatGPT enable him to commit suicide? It wrote some lullaby, and wrote something pleasing about suicide. If this much is enough to make someone do it.. there’s unfortunately more to the story. We have to be more responsible assigning blame to technology. It is irresponsible to have a reactive backlash that would push towards much more strengthening of guardrails. These things come with their own tradeoffs.
- ares623 8mo agoI think you have it backwards. OpenAI and others have to be more responsible deploying this technology. Because as you said, these things come with tradeoffs.
- simianwords 8mo agoMore guardrails means a shitter product for all of us. And it won’t do much to prevent suicides. Not sure who wins other than regulators
- g-b-r 8mo agoYou don't even know if it would mean that. It could well be that the model was trained to maximize engagement and sycophancy, at the expense of its capabilities in what you're most interested in. What makes you think it wouldn't do much to prevent these suicides?
- ares623 8mo ago> More guardrails means a shitter product for all of us the horror
- simianwords 8mo agoGod damnit this man’s story is so distressing. I hate everything about it. I hate the fact that this happened to him. The fact that he spoke about his favorite children’s book is screwed up. I can’t get the eerie name out of my head. I can’t imagine what he went through, the loneliness and the struggle. I hate the fact that ChatGPT is blamed for this. You are fucked up if this is what you get from this story.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- g-b-r 8mo ago> You are fucked up if this is what you get from this story I'd argue the opposite, but ok
- simianwords 8mo agoIt’s just a small step further to blame Amazon for delivering his childhood book. That book had more to do with his suicide than ChatGPT
- g-b-r 8mo agoSure, same thing
- 8bitsrule 8mo agoGPT keeps using the word 'I' in its responses. It uses exclamation marks! to suggest it wants to help! When I assert that its behavior is misleadingly suggesting that it's a sentient being, it replies 'You're right'. Earlier today it responded: "You're right; the design of AI can create an illusion of emotional engagement, which may serve the interest of keeping users interacting or generating revenue rather than genuinely addressing their needs or feelings." Too bad it can't learn that by itself after those 8 deaths.
- scotty79 8mo ago> Adam attempted suicide at least four times, according to the logs > [...] > “there is something chemically wrong with my brain, I’ve been suicidal since I was like 11.” > [...] > was disappointed in lack of attention from his family > [...] > “he would be here but for ChatGPT. I 100 percent believe that.”
- cowboylowrez 8mo agoif these LLMs are ever going to replace humans, they'll need more deaths like this guy, and the LLMs know it.