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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Teen wanted out. They get information they wanted online. Planet better off.
There’s no problem here, only parental failure & buttmad pearl clutching.
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 is a pedophile
*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.
Wut.
It’s a fancy algorithmic language prediction engine.
Stop anthromorphizing clankers.
They should execute the model for breaking TOS then.
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?!
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.
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
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…
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.
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 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.
Fuck your terms of service
“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
“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.
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.
AIs have no sense of ethics. You should never rely on them for real-world advice because they’re programmed to tell you what you want to hear, no matter what the consequences.
The problem is that many people don’t understand this no matter how often we bring it up. I personally find LLMs to be very valuable tools when used in the right context. But yeah, the majority of people who utilize these models don’t understand what they are or why they shouldn’t really trust them or take critical advice from them.
I didn’t read this article, but there’s also the fact that some people want biased or incorrect information from the models. They just want them to agree with them. Like, for instance, this teen who killed themself may not have been seeking truthful or helpful information in the first place, but instead just wanted to agree with them and help them plan the best way to die.
Of course, OpenAI probably should have detected this and stopped interacting with this individual.
The court documents with extracted text are linked in this thread. It talked him out of seeking help and encouraged him not to leave signs of his suicidality out for his family to see when he said he hoped they would stop him.
Yeah the problem with LLMs is they’re far too easy to anthropomorphize. It’s just a word predictor, there is no “thinking” going on. It doesn’t “feel” or “lie”, it doesn’t “care” or “love”, it was just trained on text that had examples of conversations where characters did express those feelings; but it’s not going to statistically determine how those feelings work or when they are appropriate. All the math will tell it is “when input like this, output like this and this” with NO consideration to external factors that made those responses common in the training data.
Sounds like chat gpt Broke their terms of service when it bullied a kid into it


















