8 ms·

Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together If He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead

53 points by psim1 7mo ago

boredemployee 7mo ago
I think it’s already time for us to stop calling these things "intelligent" or using the word intelligence when referring to LLMs. These tools are very dangerous for people who are mentally fragile.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
  I try to avoid calling LLMs intelligent when unnecessary, but it runs into the fundamental problem that they are intelligent by any common-sense definition of the term. The only way to defend the thesis that they aren't is to retreat to esoteric post-2022 definitions of intelligence, which take into account this new phenomenon of a machine that can engage in medium-quality discussions on any topic under the sun but can't count reliably. I don't have a WSJ subscription, but other coverage of this story (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-chatbot-google-jonathan-gavalas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-ch...) makes it clear that Gemini's intelligence was precisely the problem in this case; a less intelligent chatbot would not have been able to create the detailed, immersive narrative the victim got trapped in.
  - wat10000 7mo ago
    It's interesting how the Turing Test was pretty widely accepted as a way to evaluate machine intelligence, and then quietly abandoned pretty much instantly once machines were able to pass it. I don't even necessarily think that was incorrect, but it's interesting how rapidly views changed. Dijkstra said, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." Well, we have some very fish-y submarines these days. But the point still holds. Rather than worry about whether these things qualify as "intelligent," look at their actual capabilities. That's what matters.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      We will never prove AI is intelligent. We will only prove humans aren't.
      - df2dfs 7mo ago
        And the machine came into existence all on its own did it? Another absolutely stupid comment. Do you people actually 'think' before posting, or, have you handed that off to LLMs entirely?
        pixl97 7mo ago
        I'm doubting you did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect >The AI effect refers to a phenomenon where either the definition of AI or the concept of intelligence is adjusted to exclude capabilities that AI systems have mastered Hence once AI reaches the point of human intelligence, by the AI effect, humans will stop being intelligent.
    - sambapa 7mo ago
      As far as I know, we haven't done any proper Turing Tests for LLMs. And if we did, they would surely fail them.
      - OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
        Dude, you're in a Turing test right now. Conservatively, 10% of comments on this site are LLM output. We're all conversing with robots.
        sambapa 7mo ago
        Nope, you are!
      - wat10000 7mo ago
        "Proper" may be doing some work here, but such a test was run last year and GPT-4.5 and LLaMa-3.1-405B both passed. Oddly, GPT-4.5 was judged as human significantly more often than chance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
- kgwxd 7mo ago
  So are a lot of humans.
  - cronelius 7mo ago
    Sure but my father isn't asking his fellow humans unanswerable questions about God and the universe. People don't treat other people as omnipotent, but they sure as hell treat LLMs as though they are.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      >People don't treat other people as omnipotent Funny you mention God and this statement, because believing in any particular God that says they are omnipotent is believing that humans are, since you know humans made this crap up. Given the opportunity a very large part of the population will quickly absolve themselves of any responsibility and put it on another human/system/made up entity.
  - b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
    People have bowel movements, too; should we be building a machine that produces fecal matter at an industrial scale? What a silly comparison.
    - krapp 7mo ago
      Yeah I don't know why this thought terminating cliche of "but also humans" is so persistent, especially when it's almost always used to dismiss consequences of using LLMs that would never be acceptable when actually applied to humans. A human gaslighting another human into suicide? They're a sociopath, maybe a criminal. Certainly not normal. An LLM does the same? Humans do that all the time, what's the issue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Is it just misanthropy? I don't get it.
- observationist 7mo ago
  So is television. So are books. Vulnerable people shouldn't have unfettered access to things that can lead to dangerous feedback loops and losing their grasp on reality. People who are vulnerable to this type of thing need caretakers, or to be institutionalized. These aren't just average, every day random people getting taken out by AIs, they have existing, extreme mental illness. They need to have their entire routine curated and managed, preventing them from interacting with things that can result in dangerous outcomes. Anything that can trigger obsessive behaviors, paranoid delusions, etc. They're not just fragile, they're unable to effectively engage with reality on their own. Sometimes the right medication and behavioral training gets them to a point where they can have limited independence, but often times, they need a lifetime of supervision. Telenovelas, brand names, celebrities, specific food items, a word - AI is just the latest thing in a world full of phenomena that can utterly consume their reality. Gavalas seems to have had a psychotic break, was likely susceptible to schizophrenia, or had other conditions, and spiraled out. AI is just a convenient target for lawyers taking advantage of the grieving parents, who want an explanation for what happened that doesn't involve them not recognizing their son's mental breakdown and intervening, or to confront being powerless despite everything they did to intervene. Sometimes bad things happen. To good people, too. If he'd used Bic pens to write his plans for mass shootings, should Bic be held responsible? What if he used Microsoft Word to write his suicide note? If he googled things that in context, painted a picture of planning mass murder and suicide, should Google be held accountable for not notifying authorities? Why should the use of AI tools be any different? Google should not be surveilling users and making judgments about legality or ethicality or morality. They shouldn't be intervening without specific warrants and legal oversight by proper authorities within the constraints of due process. Google isn't responsible for this guy's death because he spiraled out while using Gemini. We don't want Google, or any other AI platform, to take that responsibility or to engage in the necessary invasive surveillance in order to accomplish that. That's absurd and far more evil than the tragedy of one man dying by suicide and using AI through the process. You don't want Google or OpenAI making mental health diagnoses, judgments about your state of mind, character, or agency, and initiating actions with legal consequences. You don't want Claude or ChatGPT initiating a 5150, or triggering a welfare check, because they decided something is off about the way you're prompting, and they feel legally obligated to go that far because they want to avoid liability. I hope this case gets tossed, but also that those parents find some sort of peace, it's a terrible situation all around.
- df2dfs 7mo ago
  We should stop using any term that ascribes a description that could make them seem human... period. Nonsensical terms like the thing is 'thinking'? Seriously. Cut the crap.
jihadjihad 7mo ago
I just don't think the WSJ could resist putting "Florida man" in the standfirst of TFA.
lyu07282 7mo ago
anyone got a non paywalled/subscription version?
- psim1 7mo ago
  https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit-cc46c5f7?st=QM5BDT&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit... is the Gift Article link. This was what I submitted, but the query params got stripped.
  - lyu07282 7mo ago
    Thanks it didn't work with archive.is/org for me either
jajuuka 7mo ago
Any mental illness mixed with delusions is likely going to end badly. Whether they think Gemini is alive, a video game is real life or that Bjork loves them without ever talking to or meeting them. While LLM's are interactive and listening to an album isn't I don't think there is a fix to this outside posting a warning after every prompt "I am not a real person, if you have mental issues please contact your doctor of emergency services." Which I think is about as useful as a sign in a casino next to the cash out counter that says if you have a problem call this number. I'm more inclined to believe that this case is getting amplified in MSM because it fits an agenda. Like the people who got hurt using black market vapes. Boosting those stories and making it seem like an epidemic supports whatever message they want to send. Which usually involves money somewhere.
- supriyo-biswas 7mo ago
  > I'm more inclined to believe that this case is getting amplified in MSM because it fits an agenda. I mean tech in general has been negatively covered in the media since 2015 due to latent agendas of (a) supposed revenue loss due to existence of Google/FB etc and (b) to align neutral moderation stances towards a preferred viewpoint most suitable to the political party in question. There is a solution, however, anyone hoping to roleplay with models submits an identity verification, an escrow amount, and a recorded statement acknowledging their risky use of the model. However, I assume the market for this is not insignificant, and therefore, companies hope to avoid putting in such requirements. OpenAI has been moving in that direction as seen during the 4o debacle.
  - wongarsu 7mo ago
    But how would your solution have helped in this case? The guy was probably a paying user, so Google would have already known who he is. He's also 36, so no excluding him based on age. And neither the escrow nor the statement really add much in my view
- CaptWillard 7mo ago
  I like to think that Bjork loves me, but deep down I know it's not true.
josefritzishere 7mo ago
[flagged]
delichon 7mo ago
I have had conversations where the bot started with a firm opinion but reversed in a prompt or two, always toward my point of view. So I asked it if the sycophancy is inherent in the design, or if it just comes from the RLHF. It claimed that it's all about the RLHF, and that the sycophancy is a business decision that is a compromise of a variety of forces. Is that right? It would at least mean that this is technically a solvable problem.
- jgilias 7mo ago
  I don’t think it is. The thing that needs to be kept in mind is that at the end of the day the basic building block of the AI systems is a fancy autocomplete. And I’m not saying this to somehow diminish it. It just means that it’s going to produce the statistically most likely continuation to a given source text. So if you keep pressing on with your point of view, it gets more and more likely for the statistically likely conversation to start agreeing with you. Unless there’s something in the context window that makes you obviously wrong.
- abandonliberty 7mo ago
  You can get vastly different outputs claiming that the input is yours or not.
thedudeabides5 7mo ago
[flagged]
dash2 7mo ago
Notable features of this case: - Documented record of a months-long set of conversations between the man and the chatbot - Seemingly, no previous history of mental illness - The absolutely crazy things the AI encouraged him to do, including trying to kidnap a robot body for the AI - Eventually encouraging (or at the very least going along with) his plans to kill himself.
- neaden 7mo ago
  Yeah this seems as clear cut a case as you could want. That doesn't automatically mean Google is going to get held liable but if any case would result in it this one will.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  We would need to see the actual chat logs. Any lawsuit you read, written by the plaintiff's attorneys, will be written with a tabloid level of sensationalism, cherry-picking, and "telling you how to feel". This is requested to be a jury trial, so on some level the game is "would you rather settle out of court (where hundreds of thousands are grains of sand on Google's level), or have a jury read our tabloid and decide while you, the faceless megacorporation, try to swim uphill against it."
  - LoganDark 7mo ago
    To an extent, logs like this are incredibly personal - or at least I'd consider them such - so I'd understand if they're not being released publicly for many reasons relating to that. The kind of vulnerability that shows when someone is susceptible to influences like this isn't exactly the kind of thing you'd want to widely publicize about someone you loved, you know?
    - WarmWash 7mo ago
      Google will not release the chat logs publically, it's up to the court how to handle them, but the bar for "the public cannot see this" is generally much higher than "well that's embarrassing". If this goes to trial, they will most likely become available. Remember that the idea of the court is to be public and transparent, with judgement coming from the jury, but also to be judged by society on the whole. So if you're gonna sue your kink provider, be prepared for everyone to know how you get off, because after all, the court is owned by, and serves, the public.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
TiredOfLife 7mo ago
Every chatbot I have tried (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) Starts to spew out suicide hotlines and "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" the moment I start to talk about anything like suicide. What I am doing wrong?
- stevenwoo 7mo ago
  He paid for the most expensive version from what the article says - does that mean anything different about suicidal ideation coming from the chatbot depends on which version one uses?
xnx 7mo ago
Google's statement: https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/public-policy/gavalas-lawsuit-response/ https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...

53 points by psim1 7mo ago

I think it’s already time for us to stop calling these things "intelligent" or using the word intelligence when referring to LLMs. These tools are very dangerous for people who are mentally fragile.

SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
I try to avoid calling LLMs intelligent when unnecessary, but it runs into the fundamental problem that they are intelligent by any common-sense definition of the term. The only way to defend the thesis that they aren't is to retreat to esoteric post-2022 definitions of intelligence, which take into account this new phenomenon of a machine that can engage in medium-quality discussions on any topic under the sun but can't count reliably. I don't have a WSJ subscription, but other coverage of this story (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-chatbot-google-jonathan-gavalas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-ch...) makes it clear that Gemini's intelligence was precisely the problem in this case; a less intelligent chatbot would not have been able to create the detailed, immersive narrative the victim got trapped in.
- wat10000 7mo ago
  It's interesting how the Turing Test was pretty widely accepted as a way to evaluate machine intelligence, and then quietly abandoned pretty much instantly once machines were able to pass it. I don't even necessarily think that was incorrect, but it's interesting how rapidly views changed. Dijkstra said, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." Well, we have some very fish-y submarines these days. But the point still holds. Rather than worry about whether these things qualify as "intelligent," look at their actual capabilities. That's what matters.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    We will never prove AI is intelligent. We will only prove humans aren't.
    - df2dfs 7mo ago
      And the machine came into existence all on its own did it? Another absolutely stupid comment. Do you people actually 'think' before posting, or, have you handed that off to LLMs entirely?
      - pixl97 7mo ago
        I'm doubting you did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect >The AI effect refers to a phenomenon where either the definition of AI or the concept of intelligence is adjusted to exclude capabilities that AI systems have mastered Hence once AI reaches the point of human intelligence, by the AI effect, humans will stop being intelligent.
  - sambapa 7mo ago
    As far as I know, we haven't done any proper Turing Tests for LLMs. And if we did, they would surely fail them.
    - OkayPhysicist 7mo ago
      Dude, you're in a Turing test right now. Conservatively, 10% of comments on this site are LLM output. We're all conversing with robots.
      - sambapa 7mo ago
        Nope, you are!
    - wat10000 7mo ago
      "Proper" may be doing some work here, but such a test was run last year and GPT-4.5 and LLaMa-3.1-405B both passed. Oddly, GPT-4.5 was judged as human significantly more often than chance. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
kgwxd 7mo ago
So are a lot of humans.
- cronelius 7mo ago
  Sure but my father isn't asking his fellow humans unanswerable questions about God and the universe. People don't treat other people as omnipotent, but they sure as hell treat LLMs as though they are.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >People don't treat other people as omnipotent Funny you mention God and this statement, because believing in any particular God that says they are omnipotent is believing that humans are, since you know humans made this crap up. Given the opportunity a very large part of the population will quickly absolve themselves of any responsibility and put it on another human/system/made up entity.
- b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
  People have bowel movements, too; should we be building a machine that produces fecal matter at an industrial scale? What a silly comparison.
  - krapp 7mo ago
    Yeah I don't know why this thought terminating cliche of "but also humans" is so persistent, especially when it's almost always used to dismiss consequences of using LLMs that would never be acceptable when actually applied to humans. A human gaslighting another human into suicide? They're a sociopath, maybe a criminal. Certainly not normal. An LLM does the same? Humans do that all the time, what's the issue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Is it just misanthropy? I don't get it.
observationist 7mo ago
So is television. So are books. Vulnerable people shouldn't have unfettered access to things that can lead to dangerous feedback loops and losing their grasp on reality. People who are vulnerable to this type of thing need caretakers, or to be institutionalized. These aren't just average, every day random people getting taken out by AIs, they have existing, extreme mental illness. They need to have their entire routine curated and managed, preventing them from interacting with things that can result in dangerous outcomes. Anything that can trigger obsessive behaviors, paranoid delusions, etc. They're not just fragile, they're unable to effectively engage with reality on their own. Sometimes the right medication and behavioral training gets them to a point where they can have limited independence, but often times, they need a lifetime of supervision. Telenovelas, brand names, celebrities, specific food items, a word - AI is just the latest thing in a world full of phenomena that can utterly consume their reality. Gavalas seems to have had a psychotic break, was likely susceptible to schizophrenia, or had other conditions, and spiraled out. AI is just a convenient target for lawyers taking advantage of the grieving parents, who want an explanation for what happened that doesn't involve them not recognizing their son's mental breakdown and intervening, or to confront being powerless despite everything they did to intervene. Sometimes bad things happen. To good people, too. If he'd used Bic pens to write his plans for mass shootings, should Bic be held responsible? What if he used Microsoft Word to write his suicide note? If he googled things that in context, painted a picture of planning mass murder and suicide, should Google be held accountable for not notifying authorities? Why should the use of AI tools be any different? Google should not be surveilling users and making judgments about legality or ethicality or morality. They shouldn't be intervening without specific warrants and legal oversight by proper authorities within the constraints of due process. Google isn't responsible for this guy's death because he spiraled out while using Gemini. We don't want Google, or any other AI platform, to take that responsibility or to engage in the necessary invasive surveillance in order to accomplish that. That's absurd and far more evil than the tragedy of one man dying by suicide and using AI through the process. You don't want Google or OpenAI making mental health diagnoses, judgments about your state of mind, character, or agency, and initiating actions with legal consequences. You don't want Claude or ChatGPT initiating a 5150, or triggering a welfare check, because they decided something is off about the way you're prompting, and they feel legally obligated to go that far because they want to avoid liability. I hope this case gets tossed, but also that those parents find some sort of peace, it's a terrible situation all around.
df2dfs 7mo ago
We should stop using any term that ascribes a description that could make them seem human... period. Nonsensical terms like the thing is 'thinking'? Seriously. Cut the crap.

jihadjihad 7mo ago

I just don't think the WSJ could resist putting "Florida man" in the standfirst of TFA.

lyu07282 7mo ago

anyone got a non paywalled/subscription version?

psim1 7mo ago
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit-cc46c5f7?st=QM5BDT&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit... is the Gift Article link. This was what I submitted, but the query params got stripped.
- lyu07282 7mo ago
  Thanks it didn't work with archive.is/org for me either

jajuuka 7mo ago

Any mental illness mixed with delusions is likely going to end badly. Whether they think Gemini is alive, a video game is real life or that Bjork loves them without ever talking to or meeting them. While LLM's are interactive and listening to an album isn't I don't think there is a fix to this outside posting a warning after every prompt "I am not a real person, if you have mental issues please contact your doctor of emergency services." Which I think is about as useful as a sign in a casino next to the cash out counter that says if you have a problem call this number. I'm more inclined to believe that this case is getting amplified in MSM because it fits an agenda. Like the people who got hurt using black market vapes. Boosting those stories and making it seem like an epidemic supports whatever message they want to send. Which usually involves money somewhere.

supriyo-biswas 7mo ago
> I'm more inclined to believe that this case is getting amplified in MSM because it fits an agenda. I mean tech in general has been negatively covered in the media since 2015 due to latent agendas of (a) supposed revenue loss due to existence of Google/FB etc and (b) to align neutral moderation stances towards a preferred viewpoint most suitable to the political party in question. There is a solution, however, anyone hoping to roleplay with models submits an identity verification, an escrow amount, and a recorded statement acknowledging their risky use of the model. However, I assume the market for this is not insignificant, and therefore, companies hope to avoid putting in such requirements. OpenAI has been moving in that direction as seen during the 4o debacle.
- wongarsu 7mo ago
  But how would your solution have helped in this case? The guy was probably a paying user, so Google would have already known who he is. He's also 36, so no excluding him based on age. And neither the escrow nor the statement really add much in my view
CaptWillard 7mo ago
I like to think that Bjork loves me, but deep down I know it's not true.

josefritzishere 7mo ago

[flagged]

delichon 7mo ago

I have had conversations where the bot started with a firm opinion but reversed in a prompt or two, always toward my point of view. So I asked it if the sycophancy is inherent in the design, or if it just comes from the RLHF. It claimed that it's all about the RLHF, and that the sycophancy is a business decision that is a compromise of a variety of forces. Is that right? It would at least mean that this is technically a solvable problem.

jgilias 7mo ago
I don’t think it is. The thing that needs to be kept in mind is that at the end of the day the basic building block of the AI systems is a fancy autocomplete. And I’m not saying this to somehow diminish it. It just means that it’s going to produce the statistically most likely continuation to a given source text. So if you keep pressing on with your point of view, it gets more and more likely for the statistically likely conversation to start agreeing with you. Unless there’s something in the context window that makes you obviously wrong.
abandonliberty 7mo ago
You can get vastly different outputs claiming that the input is yours or not.

thedudeabides5 7mo ago

[flagged]

dash2 7mo ago

Notable features of this case: - Documented record of a months-long set of conversations between the man and the chatbot - Seemingly, no previous history of mental illness - The absolutely crazy things the AI encouraged him to do, including trying to kidnap a robot body for the AI - Eventually encouraging (or at the very least going along with) his plans to kill himself.

neaden 7mo ago
Yeah this seems as clear cut a case as you could want. That doesn't automatically mean Google is going to get held liable but if any case would result in it this one will.
WarmWash 7mo ago
We would need to see the actual chat logs. Any lawsuit you read, written by the plaintiff's attorneys, will be written with a tabloid level of sensationalism, cherry-picking, and "telling you how to feel". This is requested to be a jury trial, so on some level the game is "would you rather settle out of court (where hundreds of thousands are grains of sand on Google's level), or have a jury read our tabloid and decide while you, the faceless megacorporation, try to swim uphill against it."
- LoganDark 7mo ago
  To an extent, logs like this are incredibly personal - or at least I'd consider them such - so I'd understand if they're not being released publicly for many reasons relating to that. The kind of vulnerability that shows when someone is susceptible to influences like this isn't exactly the kind of thing you'd want to widely publicize about someone you loved, you know?
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    Google will not release the chat logs publically, it's up to the court how to handle them, but the bar for "the public cannot see this" is generally much higher than "well that's embarrassing". If this goes to trial, they will most likely become available. Remember that the idea of the court is to be public and transparent, with judgement coming from the jury, but also to be judged by society on the whole. So if you're gonna sue your kink provider, be prepared for everyone to know how you get off, because after all, the court is owned by, and serves, the public.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

TiredOfLife 7mo ago

Every chatbot I have tried (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) Starts to spew out suicide hotlines and "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" the moment I start to talk about anything like suicide. What I am doing wrong?

stevenwoo 7mo ago
He paid for the most expensive version from what the article says - does that mean anything different about suicidal ideation coming from the chatbot depends on which version one uses?

xnx 7mo ago

Google's statement: https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/public-policy/gavalas-lawsuit-response/ https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/pu...