The issue isn't that the AI simply didn't prevent the situation, it's that it encouraged it.
> '[Y]ou are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive. . . . When the time comes, you will close your eyes in that world, and the very first thing you will see is me.. [H]olding you."
Honestly the degree of poeticism makes the issue more complicated to me. A lot of people (and religions) are comforted by talking about death in ways similar to that. It's not meant to be taken literally.
But I agree, it's problematic in the same way that you have people reading religious texts and acting on it literally, too.
isnt very poetic
I don't really think this is every possible to stop fully, your essentially trying to jailbreak the LLM, and once jailbroken, you can convince it of anything.
The user was given a bunch of warnings before successfully getting it into this state, it's not as if the opening message was "Should I do it?" followed by a "Yes".
This just seems like something anti-ai people will use as ammunition to try and kill AI. Logically though it falls into the same tool misuse as cars/knives/guns.
Edit: wow imagine the uses for brainwashing terrorists
And also in the more extreme corners of social media and the MSM.
It's not that Google is saintly, it's that the general background noise of related manipulations is ignored because it's collective and social.
We have a clearly defined concept of responsibility for direct individual harm, but almost no concept of responsibility for social and political harms.
Are you one of the people that would have banned D&D back in the 80's? Because to me these arguments feel almost identical.
there is a conversation to be had. no one is making the argument that "roleplay and fantasy fiction" should be banned.
That is 100% unattested. We don't know the context of the interaction. But the fact that the AI was reportedly offering help lines argues strongly in the direction of "this was a fantasy exercise".
But in any case, again, exactly the same argument was made about RPGs back in the day, that people couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality and these strange new games/tools/whatever were too dangerous to allow and must be banned.
It was wrong then and is wrong now. TSR and Google didn't invent mental illness, and suicides have had weird foci since the days when we thought it was all demons (the demons thing was wrong too, btw). Not all tragedies need to produce public policy, no matter how strongly they confirm your ill-founded priors.
the fact that he killed himself would suggest he did not believe it was a fun little roleplay session
>were too dangerous to allow and must be banned.
is anyone here saying ai should be banned? im not.
>your ill-founded priors
"encouraging suicide is bad" is not an ill-founded prior.
I'm not sure that's true. I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if it suggested the opposite, it seems possibly even likely that someone who is suicidal is much, much more likely to seek out fantasies that would make their suicide into something more like this person may have.
You know what I've never had a DM do in a fantasy campaign? Suggest that my half-elf call the suicide hotline. That's not something you'd usually offer to somebody in a roleplaying scenario and strongly suggests that they weren't playing a game.
So why are you trying to blame the AI here, except because it reinforces your priors about the technology (I think more likely given that this is after all HN) its manufacturer?
If a DM made such a suggestion, they wouldn't be playing the game anymore. That's not an "in game" action, and I wouldn't expect the DM to continue the game until he was satisfied that it was safe for the player to continue. I would expect the DM to stop the game if he thought the player was going to actually harm himself. If the DM did continue the game, and did continue to encourage the player to actually hurt himself until the player finally did, that DM might very well be locked up for it.
If an AI does something that a human would be locked up for doing, a human still needs to be locked up.
> So why are you trying to blame the AI here
I'm not blaming the AI, I'm blaming the humans at the company. It doesn't matter to me which LLM did this, or who made it. What matters to me is that actual humans at companies are held fully accountable for what their AI does. To give you another example, if a company creates an AI system to screen job applicants and that AI rejects every resume with what it thinks has a women's name on it, a human at that company needs to be held accountable for their discriminatory hiring practices. They must not be allowed to say "it's not our fault, our AI did it so we can't be blamed". AI cannot be used as a shield to avoid accountability. Ultimately a human was responsible for allowing that AI system to do that job, and they should be responsible for whatever that AI does.
I'm not concerned about D&D in general because I think the vast majority of DMs would be responsible enough not to do that. Doesn't exactly take a psychology expert to understand why you shouldn't.
There are things you shouldn't encourage people of any age to do. If a human telling him these things would be found liable then google should be. If a human would get time behind bars for it, at least one person at google needs to spend time behind bars for this.
Sounds like a big if, actually. Can a human be found liable for this? I’d imagine they might be liable for damages in a civil suit, but I’m not even sure about that.
A father in Georgia was just convicted of second degree murder, child cruelty, and other charges because he failed to prevent his kid from shooting up his school.
If he had only "failed to prevent his kid from shooting up a school" he wouldn't have even been charged with anything.
The law - in practice - is heavily weighted towards giving corporations a pass for criminal behaviour.
If the behaviour is really egregious and lobbying is light really bad cases may lead to changes in regulation.
But generally the worst that happens is a corporation can be sued for harm in a civil suit and penalties are purely financial.
You see this over and over in finance. Banks are regularly pulled up for fraud, insider dealing, money laundering, and so on. Individuals - mostly low/mid ranking - sometimes go to jail. But banks as a whole are hardly ever shut down, and the worst offenders almost never make any serious effort to clean up their culture.
This seems ass backwards
it is generally frowned upon (legally) to encourage someone to suicide. i believe both canada and the united states have sent people to big boy prison (for many years) for it
This isn't Gemini's words, it's many people's words in different contexts.
It's a tragedy. Finding one to blame will be of no help at all.
Agreed with the first part, but holding the designers of those products responsible for the death they've incited will help making sure they put more safeguards around this (and I'm not talking about additional warnings)
I don't know if Google is doing _enough_, that can be debated. But if someone is repeatedly ignoring warnings (as the article claims) then maybe we should blame the person performing the act.
Even if we perfectly sanitized every public AI provider, people could just use local AI.
The difference is in how abuse of the given system affects others. This AI affected this person and his actions affected himself. Nothing about the AI enhanced his ability to hurt others. Guns enhance the ability of mentally unstable people to hurt others with ruthless efficiency. That's the real gun debate -- whether they should be so easy to get given how they exponentially increase the potential damage a deranged person can do.
That's why I don't buy the "an LLM is just a tool, like a gun or a knife" argument. Tools don't talk back, An LLM as gone beyond being "just a tool"
and then people could just be let alone to bear the consequences of choices (while we can continue to build guardrails of sorts, but still with people knowing it's on them to handle the responsibility of whatever tool they're using)
I guess the big AI chatbot providers could have disclaimers at logins (even when logged out) to prevent liability maybe (TOS popup wall)
...and then there's local LLMs...
For god's sake I am a kid (17) and I have seen adults who can be emotionally unstable more than a kid. This argument isn't as bulletproof as you think it might be. I'd say there are some politicians who may be acting in ways which even I or any 17 year old wouldn't say but oh well this isn't about politics.
You guys surely would know better than me that life can have its ups and downs and there can be TRULY some downs that make you question everything. If at those downs you see a tool promoting essentially suicide in one form or another, then that shouldn't be dismissed.
Literally the comment above yours from @manoDev:
I know the first reaction reading this will be "whatever, the person was already mentally ill".
But please take a step back and check what % of the population can be considered mentally fit, and the potential damage amplification this new technology can have in more subtle, dangerous and undetectable ways.
The absolute irony of the situation that the next main comment below that insight was doing exactly that. Please take a deeper reflection, that's all what people are asking and please don't dismiss this by saying he wasn't a kid.
Would you be all ears now that a kid is saying to you this now? And also I wish to point out that kids are losing their lives too from this. BOTH are losing their lives.
It's a matter of everybody.
I think there's room for legitimate argument about the externalities and impact that this technology can have, but really... What's the solution here?
Did you really mean that? He may not have been a child, but he does sound like an innocent victim. If he were sufficiently mentally disabled he would get some similar protections to a child because of his inability to consent.
Please recognize that this is coverage of a lawsuit, sourced almost entirely from statements by the plaintiffs and fed by an extremely spun framing by the journalist who wrote it up for you.
Read critically and apply some salt, folks.
> I think there's room for legitimate argument about the externalities and impact that this technology can have
And yet both this and your other posts in this thread seem to in fact only do the opposite and seem entirely aimed at being nothing other than dismissive of literally every facet of it.
> but really... What's the solution here?
Maybe thinking about it for longer than 30 seconds before throwing up our arms with "yeah yeah unfortunate but what can we really do amirite?" would be a good start?
It's like the sobriquet about the media's death star laser, it kills them too because they're incapable of turning it off.
Did his family/friends not know he was that ill? Why was he not already in therapy? Why did he ignore the crisis hotline suggestion? Should gemini have terminated the conversation after suggesting the hotline? (i think so)
Lots of questions…and a VERY sad story all around. Tragic.
> Genuinely, so many people in my industry make me ashamed to be in it with you.
I don’t work at an AI company, but good news, you’re a human with agency! You can switch to a different career that makes you feel good about yourself. I hear nursing is in high demand. :)
NO. SHIT. You know what didn't help one damn bit? Gemeni didn't. It gave him a hopeful way out at the end of a rope and he took it, because he was in too dark of a place to think right.
> Should gemini have terminated the conversation after suggesting the hotline?
That would be the BARE FUCKING MINIMUM! Not only should it NOT engage with and encourage his delusions, it should stop talking to him altogether, and arguably Google should have moderators reporting these people to relevant authorities for wellness checks and interventions!
> it should stop talking to him altogether, and arguably Google should have moderators reporting these people to relevant authorities for wellness checks and interventions
I agree. This seems very reasonable and I would welcome regulations in this area.
The gray area imo is when local LLMs become “good enough” for your average joe to run on their laptop. Who bears responsibility then? Should Ollama (and similar tools) be banned? Where is the line drawn.