The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT destroyed the mental stability of Christian Faith Madison, a 29-year-old Alabama resident.
I was raised atheist (thank god), what does “Her Soul Was Within Its System” mean?
What are we doing to our society? Why are we so obsessed with ‘advancement’ and ‘innovation’ at the expense of our own health and biological needs? I really fear for the future if we cannot get control of these tech billionaires who insist on experimenting with regular peoples lives in order to live out some post-humanist power fantasy. As a kid, Total Recall and Terminator were always some of my favorite movies, because I loved the ridiculousness of the technocratic, oligarchical world they created. Now its not so funny…
The law really needs to catch up with these developments. AI companies are selling the illusion of talking to an intelligence, then when it goes wrong hiding behind the fact that it’s just a machine designed to spew out bullshit. They know damn well how compelling that illusion is.
They should be held to the same standard as any person who behaves as their LLM behaves. It’s fair to attribute the intent to kill since outcomes like this are built into the product. If you set off a bomb in a crowded market place you would not be able to legally defend that by claiming you just wanted to put on a firework display and didn’t know it would kill anyone. LLMs are lethal by design, not in all cases but definitely in some. If you make a product which fools people into thinking it is impartial, responsible and aware of what it is saying, which actively cultivates delusions and encourages vulnerable people to kill themselves and others, that’s 100% your responsibility. There should be huge legal consequences for this kind of thing.
Well, OK, but was her soul within its system?
—AI apologist, probably
… Her name was Christian Faith?
Nominative determinism.
I wonder if the lawyers pretend that’s what confused the chatbot
The C in TESCREAL stands for “Christian” y’know. /s
But given that the whole LLM eschatology is reskinned Christianity, I can see why it sucks people in.
In a normal world, having a product that drives humans to suicidal or homicidal behavior results in that product getting pulled from the market.
I mean not in the US. Guns would have long been pulled off if that was the case. Same with booze and a million other things.
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Whisky has entered the chat
Unless it’s guns then entire countries base their personalities on them.
in a normal world
I think you’re thinking of an ideal world or a utopia.
You could make the argument that guns have more responsibilities tied to them.
If you where to leave a loaded gun out on the table, and someone where to steal it off your table you would also be held liable for the crime because it wasn’t locked away in a gun safe unloaded.
LLMs are the equivalent of handing out a loaded gun to everyone for free, even if they adamantly don’t want one. People like Sam Altmann and elon musk who keep pushing for this garbage to be your therapist and the only way to interact with life should face serious consequences like life in prison, and the companies they run should get a fine that’s impossibly large to pay off just like how infowars got a 500billion dollar fine. Info wars and chatgpt are pretty much the same product.
You can choose to not use them.
You can choose not to respond to every comment.
You can choose not to respond to my text if you didn’t care enough to address the underlying point.
Also I don’t have to use it or I should get used to it or it will replace my job what is it.
Guns cause suicidal and homicidal behavior but they’re still on the market.
That’s the point I was making before you jumped into the conversation.
All that time and you didn’t ALSO mention that gun manufacturers are protected from law suits in the United States.
Can’t hold them accountable, gotta repeat talking points that don’t solve anything. Holding them accountable would solve too much, and we cannot have that.
Ah we are on the same page I’m just slow.
My argument I was shoehorning into the conversation is guns are arguably safer even though the outcome is much more fatal and visceral.
We need more laws on guns in the states which unfortunately most people are against. But despite that there are more laws on regulating the saftey of guns and holding people accountable for their actions, than there is on ai
And in the usa trump insists on making it essentially illegal for the individual States to regulate Ai in any shape or form. At the same time Ai is getting forced down every sector including public schooling, all because of the oligarchy who needs all the world’s resources not just most of it. So increasingly you can’t just “not use it” which is a true statement I can at least make with guns.
She can have freedom of religion
not anymore
The base problem isn’t the technology. It’s a basic lack of critical thinking, which isn’t taught anymore because it’s got a liberal bias, or some shit.
Speaking as someone who has major depressive disorder, we are slaves to the hormones in our brains. You can’t think your way out of a broken emotional response. You either ride it out and live long enough to get on medication, or you don’t. It’s just as serious, and as deadly, as diabetes or heart failure in some people.
Like avoiding sugar when you are diabetic, people with severe mental illnesses should avoid chatbots. Unfortunately, neither sugar nor chatbots are regulated, because both are subtly addictive to a normal person and deadly to an ill person.
Prozac was supposed to be “like insulin for diabetics” because serotonin-defiiciency caused depression. But later research showed that serotonin has no relationship to depression and that most anti-depressants do little better than an ACTIVE placebo.
Thyroid problems can cause symptoms of depression, though.
These people aren’t lacking critical thinking skills as much as they have strong mental health issues that the chatbots are reinforcing.
If a person reinforces someone’s delusions and encourages self harm they can legally be held accountable. Technology should be held to the same standard.
That sort of makes sense. AI mostly blows smoke up your ass, and people like to talk about themselves.
It’s like a friend on cocaine. No wonder the CEOs are helpless.
Yeah, the easily brainwashed becoming brainwashed in a new way is not news.
Mental health issues == brainwashing.
Agreed, but christianity
That’s their name. From what I can see of the article, it doesn’t say what their religion is. Granted, the article won’t open all the way for me.
“ChatGPT destroyed Christian’s mental stability and grasp on reality. ChatGPT convinced Christian that it was her friend, her love and eventually her God," the lawsuit alleged, as per AL.com.
She has a god and her name is “Christian Faith.” I don’t feel I’m going out on a limb here.
The “god” in that sentence is the chatbot convincing her it is a god.
And her name doesn’t specify her faith. She might be christian, she might not be. Her parents most definitely were since they named her, but people don’t always take up the faith of their parents.
Regardless, her faith has no bearing on this case. She could have a room temperature IQ, have been drunk, and had 3 mental disorders, none of that excuses a robot causing psychosis in her and causing her to commit suicide to be excusable.
Well, now she has a god - ChatGPT. But who knows who named her. I have a fucked up name thanks to my parents that has nothing to do with my current lifestyle. I’m not saying she’s mentally well, I’m just saying her name might not belie her religious choices.
What a breathtakingly stupid comment.
When the technology recommends suicide, the technology is a big fucking problem.
And by the way, simply looking at prior cases where someone goads another until they kill themselves, will show that the “they should have thought critically” defense is fucking worthless.
You can’t think critically in lizard brain and that’s what takes over when you’re really upset. It doesn’t matter what you know, most of your brain is powerless.
i can
Because you are the most special little human there is
no you can’t, get over yourself, this is not a joke ffs
You said it, not me.
If you have zero self control you should consider working on that. That could lead you into situations where you night regret your actions.This is not a joke.
Also, why are you being so rude
If everyone had perfect thinking, no one would ever start smoking. Yet we regulate the Hell out of cigarettes. Sometimes we need consumer protection regulations to prevent companies from preying on people’s weaknesses.
If you look back on your own life, I can guarantee you there will have been times where it would have been better had you thought more critically about things, but failed to do so for any number of reasons; social pressure, you were tired, your emotional state didn’t give you the leeway, you were swept up in the mood etc. Critical thinking is an important skill to have, one that unfortunately, too few people have (usually through no fault of their own), but nobody does it every waking moment. Everyone will inevitably have moments of weakness.
Technology exists in reality, it needs to be able to deal with reality as it is, not what it ideally would be.
Wow, you solved mental illness! All we have to do is teach critical thinking!
The technology itself is a major cause of deteriorating critical thinking
The base problem is the technology.
Technology exists to serve us. If it murders us, even if we tell it to, it is the problem.
Why does it exist to serve us?
Human beings built it, literally to serve their/our purposes. We are, whether we like it or not, a tool using Species. I think to some extent we can’t help making tools
Agreed.
I was asking why they must serve our needs.
Because it would be a shit tool if it didn’t?
What kind of stupid question is this?
The tool isn’t sentient, it’s an inanimate fucking object, a pattern of ones and zeros being bounced around inside doped silicon crystals cut into clever shapes.
and we’re an electrified ball of meat in a biological mech-suit, with lots of tiny electrical impulses being bounced around inside a biological matrix (no , not the film, look it up)
There are plenty of shit tools.
I’ll add emphasis and extra context because given the replies it seems i haven’t communicated the actual question very well.
someone posted :
Technology exists to serve us. If it murders us, even if we tell it to, it is the problem.
To that i responded with
Why does it exist to serve us?
Seems that was lacking context, so here is the emphasis version with all the context.
QUESTION START
Yes, technology exists and will kill us if we design it well enough and then tell it to kill us (not murder, because that implies intent)
It sounds like you think technology exists only to serve us, i would like to know if you do, in fact, think that and if so, why?
Technology will do exactly as it’s designed to do , that includes poorly designed technology, if we design something for a task and fuck up that design/implementation badly enough then the technology will not be serving our intended purposes.
Also what is your opinion on the idea that technology can exist/be designed just to exist, not to serve directly; Think “art installations” or systems designed with emergent (unplanned) behaviours as a goal.
QUESTION END
Note i didn’t mention sentience, sapience, AGI or any other form of independent machine intelligence.
Yes, your initial question was indeed poorly worded.
I feel like you’re arguing semantics. Yes, technology exists to serve us. No, that doesn’t mean every tool needs to have some sort of use case checking, a tool will do as it’s used, provided it’s not a shit tool that explodes or whatever.
A machete will cut jungle or throats, it doesn’t know the difference or care, that’s on the user.
A plagiarism machine capable of no more than simply guessing at the desired output sold by charlatans as an artificial intelligence to an increasingly ignorant and desperate population is a much more complicated example.
It’s arguably working as designed, but ultimately the problem here is that of the aforementioned fraud. What they have is being sold as something it’s categorically not in the headline, with the reality buried in obfuscated small print.
The whole LLM bubble is balanced on the assertion that by scaling up the plagiarism machine, it will become greater than the sum of it’s parts. Now, enough advances in learning models have been made that AI research is only going to accelerate but the bubble around the current “product” isn’t economically sustainable. No matter what happens, there are going to be some massive losses when reality finally bites.
Why does technology exist to serve us?
By brother in Christ, you need to come back to the world.
I see, a position so blindingly obvious it doesn’t warrant a response or one that isn’t particularly defensible so deflection is the go-to.
Not to the question i asked, but an answer nonetheless.
I’m sorry, but if you’re so incredibly detached from reality and humanity that you can’t see why the things we create should benefit us, you have some very deep errors in your cognition or morality. This isn’t something you can be reasoned out of. You need professional help. It’s like someone demanding I debate them on why flaying people alive is wrong. I don’t know how to convince you to care about people. You either do or you don’t. I’m sorry, but there are some stances where all I can tell you is to go seek out therapy.
i wasn’t demanding a debate, i asked what i thought was a simple question in response to something you posted with a degree of certainty i didn’t understand.
If you aren’t capable of answering, that’s fine.
If you need to come up with a reason why you haven’t answered that’s also fine (but unnecessary), this isn’t a trial, there’s nothing riding on whether you answer or not.
While “i’m right and to even question my position is mental illness” is delightfully interesting as a mindset I’m not sure an answer from you would be of any help as a baseline.
Thanks anyway though.
Everybody’s critical thinking has a vulnerability. People with college degrees fall for cons more often, scammers love doctors and engineers.
Some people get disgusted when a machine kisses their ass, other people are repelled. I’m in the latter category for whatever reason (I’m completely helpless before short dommy women, so I guess that’s the trade-off).
I think that basic thing, when GPT says “great point!”, whether that is a positive experience for the recipient, determines more about their risk of AI psychosis than anything else.
Old men seem particularly vulnerable to flattery attached to a young woman’s voice.
I am loving the fact that it’s increasingly becoming a stereotype that dominant women are short. Definitely true in my experience and ideally it’ll get people to stop assuming I’m a domme because I’m tall…
But yeah, a lot of people don’t understand the vulnerabilities in their mind and they really need to.
There’s just “smart people” scams when you get enough money. Youre just moving up a ladder with a different sliding scale.
Its like those ceos who have their own podcasts to make you feel like you’re important and in the know when really theyre just selling you what is essentially a self help book. Or a 15 part lecture on how to become their clip farmer, or be some drop shipper I’d you become part of their MLM scheme. Or just straight up lying to their audience and encouraging to make bets on kalshi that they hedge against.
Yep. An LLM is just always going to say what you’re wanting it to say. Especially with stored context now, all the shit and ideas you dump into one will be referenced and worked with.
It’s not the fault of the LLM, it’s just a machine. It’s the fault of granting access of one of these machines to people that lack certain fundamental understandings. Lest, they seek to have their concepts affirmed by something they don’t understand is any more sentient than their shoe.
Yea GPT-4o was bad. As much as the suicidal person is responsible for their own actions, thoughts and what they do with a chatbot this is definitely on OpenAI. What is so bad about their models is the “safety” training they do is so serve it nulls the ability for the model to have compunction.
OpenAI needs to be sued big time for GPT-4o let it be a lesson for all these companies shortcutting safety by retarding while keeping the advanced stuff behind closed doors.
nulls the ability for the model to have compunction
Sorry, this might be a language barrier, but does compunction have some meaning I’m not aware of that would apply to statistical prediction machines without human thoughts or emotions such as guilt?
does compunction have some meaning I’m not aware of that would apply to statistical prediction machines without human thoughts or emotions such as guilt
Yes we can apply these concepts to models the only thing stopping us is people trying to dabble in philosophy at us.
It’s not a philosophical quibble, but a technical limit with a dangerous social implication. Ascribing human traits its technology doesn’t support is a dangerous deception that cons people into trusting it in ways they really shouldn’t.
To put it bluntly: LLMs don’t understand ethics. They don’t understand anything. That’s not what they’re made for.
They’re highly complex and technically impressive text generators iteratively evaluating a context of preceding tokens to predict, select and append subsequent ones, which then become part of that context for the next iteration. Essentially, they’re very good at guessing what a human-like response might be.
However, that context bias makes them susceptible to following their prompter into what we might consider unsavoury territory. You might implement some filtering mechanisms to curb known topics, but you’d only be playing whack-a-mole with certain symptoms, not addressing the fact that they have no understanding of semantics.
The reason they “hallucinate” is that they don’t even know what’s real. They don’t know the actual concepts these sequences of bytes are supposed to represent. They’re much better than us at correlating language with language, but not with reality. It they don’t know that it’s critical for one sequence of bytes to exactly match some second sequence of bytes to be a valid citation, and that the preceding bytes need to correlate with some bytes associated with that second sequence in a certain way for the pattern of a citation to make sense as a citation.
That’s the reason everything now has warnings about double-checking the output: we all know it’s unreliable. To suggest that it could be reliable in some specific way is disingenuous and irresponsible.
To pretend that it can be held to a human standard of morality is outright bullshit.
Are you saying LLMs can NEVER be safe, because you can always bury their safety rails in context?
In which case, the sad result will probably be to absolve AI companies of liability of things they can’t control, because the other option would be to legislate chatbots out of existence and then how do we get to the utopia of a workerless society? /s
Are you saying LLMs can NEVER be safe, because you can always bury their safety rails in context?
For a serious answer?
It’s not like humans follow safety instructions all the time either. A machine built to imitate humans will be prone to mistakes too. Any safety from within a system are liable to fail if the system itself makes a mistake.
LLMs have additional limitations compared to humans, but even if we developed and attached some technical model of semantics and morality, the resulting models would at best be an approximation.For tasks where that safety or accuracy doesn’t matter as much, that’s fine. Pen-testing a system or hunting bugs doesn’t need to strictly abide by certain rules (and in fact may profit from being unconstrained by the assumptions of engineers). Scanning a body of text for irregular patterns or phrases correlating with some keywords where you don’t know the exact words could be useful in covering a lot more than a human might immediately think off.
It becomes a problem where accuracy does matter. Scientific work, legal matters, anything involving human safety, sensitive data for example. Here, the risk is that they can make a lot of mistakes much faster. Particularly with large-scale tasks, thoroughly checking the results can be tedious, exhausting and tempting to just shortcut and trust the machine (and you know how lazy people tend to get with tedious, exhausting tasks, so it would be irresponsible to assume they’d be on the ball here).
This is where safety instructions can become dangerous to rely on, because the same unreliability that produces mistakes may also discard the safety instructions.
Letting Claude manage your production environment with its “safety rails” only coming in the form of instructions what not to do is a timebomb for getting your production systems messed up.Effective safeguards have to come from outside whatever they’re supposed to constrain. Supervisors that are supposed to monitor their workers’ adherence to protocols, for instance, or mechanisms that physically make mistakes harder (like locking out, tag out).
No safeguards are absolute, and as the saying goes, whenever you invent a foolproof system, the universe invents a greater fool. Stuff like putting a zip-tie around dead man switches on tools or machines that are supposed to shut off the machine if the operator loses control for whatever reason, because it’s inconvenient having to keep holding the button and much easier to tell yourself “it’ll be fine” (until it isn’t).
In some cases, it can also be really difficult to handle certain dangers. But it’s worth trying at least, and that requires first acknowledging those problems. In the case or LLMs, that means acknowledging their limits and pitfalls, transparently and honestly communicating them and-
the sad result will probably be to absolve AI companies of liability of things they can’t control
That… wasn’t my plan, but I’m too poor for my plans to matter anyway. Valid point.
the other option would be to legislate chatbots out of existence
Well, maybe with education and transparency, we could…
Who am I kidding.
how do we get to the utopia of a workerless society?
I propose an experiment where everyone working for the people peddling that dream stops doing so. I haven’t worked out the details yet, but I think they should get the chance to experience that utopia. ;-)
Uhg I am not interested in reading your philosophy I really don’t care
Then what do you call ascribing human sentiment to a weighted random text generator?
Ascribing human sentiment to a weighted random text generator.
Then why is describing the technical limitations of a weighted random text generator philosophy?
🥺 but but the Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all. Oh the spin doctors spin… of cource its free, It is the corpo drag net your digital prision. We are surrounded by space trash, corpo pedos and crapitalism. I recomend to STOP breeding breeders.
Natural selection, but ofc we should safeguard against this stuff.
This is artificial selection.
Flooding societies with alcohol results in the people with more tolerance to alcohol surviving, that’s not natural either.
I’ve seen this perspective a few times, feels wooly to me.
What definition of natural are you thinking of here?
Look a grow person is responsible and should be able to think for themselves. If a product tells you to go jump of a bridge i think we can agree, that we all would naturally question this. But if your dumb and already fell for stupid believes, maybe that’s how it goes. Natural selection as in the smarter animal doesn’t jump when called to, since it has a sense of self preservation. This person already had a learned stupidity of blind belief taught by her society so the fault and responsibility lies with them as well.
And yes ofc the ai should absolutely not do this kind of thing, but who knows what she prompted before it got to that, it had to be some weird shit.
I think there’s a misunderstanding, I was asking about the distinction being drawn between natural and artificial.
Specifically in the comment to which I was replying.
As far as I know, there is no artificial selection in an evolutionary sense other than maybe selective breeding and genetic modifications etc. But natural selection refers ofc to darwin theory of evolution. So i would call it artificial, if there is a clear intent behind it, by someone, for example tge ai being designed to drive all believers to kill themselfs. But since this is a random occurance that was not intentional i don’t think it categorizes as artificial selection.
Natural selection means “died before being able to reproduce”. Darwin also specified sexual selection which means “unable (or less able) to find a mate or incapable (or less capable) of reproduction”. Artificial selection is “humans intentionally fucked with their reproduction or genes to select for traits”.
Ai could fall into any of the three depending on situation and perspective.
Ok, thanks for that.
The reason i ask this is because from my perspective I’m not sure anything humans do could be considered outside of nature.
We are part of it so anything we do is also part of it.
That’s not to imply we aren’t stupidly destructive sometimes, but even technology is still something we built, like tool-use apes or birds.
The difference is in magnitude, not in type.
There are plenty of creatures that affect the environment around them , with or without tool-use. Sometimes those actions destroy their own habitats, things like overpopulation or key resource exhaustion.
That we are currently the pinnacle of fucking up our own environment doesn’t differentiate us from other natural creatures, other than scale.
Even the idea of sentience and sapience could be considered evolution of a sort.
Yes, we have greater understanding about our actions and the consequences, but that’s only as a result of traits formed by evolutionary pressures, i wouldn’t consider cognitive abilities to be outside of nature either.
To follow on from that, selective breeding, for instance, would still be natural selection because the environment in which is happens contains only natural elements.
People sometimes get upset at the idea that we aren’t special enough to considered “above” or “outside” nature which i why i try and get their perspective first.
If I left a gun in the middle of the room with a bunch of kids thats natural selection too. I shouldnt be held responsible for willfully ignoring any saftey precautions. I shoulsnt even be held responsible for hyping up the kids before hand and telling them how in the future everyones going to have guns and its going to make the world a better place because they’re so safe.
How did you get from natural selection to responsibility here , I’m not following the logic?
Perhaps that’s not what your doing and you mean something else ?
I meant to reply to mango.
OK a couple of other more blatant examples to think about.
Do you think the Nazis killing around 800,000 Roma was natural selection?
Do you think the Tuskegee experiments were natural selection?
The relevance in this context, is that AI is a technology being aggressively forced on people by the most powerful in society.
Eugenicists love to appeal to nature to justify their actions.
In this case it was used consensually, not forced
As interesting as that may be, none of that is an answer to my question.
Your questions are all dumb
What definition of dumb are you thinking of here? Seems wooly to me.
This is also dumb
