As someone who is very lonely, chatbots like these scare the shit out of me, not only for their seeming lack of limits, but also for the fact that you have to pay for access.
I know I have a bit of an addictive personality, and know that this kind of system could completely ruin me.
You could run your own if you have the hardware for it (most upper mid-range gaming pc will do, 6gb+ gpu)
Then something like KoboldAI + SillyTavern would work well
caused
Hmmm
If a HumanA pushed and convinced HumanB to kill themselves, then HumanA caused it. IMO they murdered them. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t pull the trigger. I don’t care what the legal definitions say.
If a chatbot did the same thing, it’s no different. Except in this case, it’s a team of developers behind it that did so, that allowed it to do so. Character.ai has blood on their hands, should be completely dismantled, and every single person at that company tried for manslaughter.
Your comment might cause me to do something. You’re responsible. I don’t care what the legal definitions say.
A very poor Lemmy article headline. The linked article says “alleged” and clearly there were multiple factors involved.
The title is straight from the article
That is odd. It’s not what I see:
Could be different headlines for different regions?
Or they changed the headline and due to caches CDNs or other reasons you didn’t get the newer one.
archive.today has your original headline cached.
Thanks for posting. While it’s a needlessly provocative headline, if that’s what the article headline was, then that is what the Lemmy one should be.
Why does a suicidal 14 year old have access to a gun?
America
Bro it’s an AI. It doesn’t have any reasoning skills it’s just stringing words together.
Man, what a complex problem with no easy answers. No sarcasm, it’s a hard thing. On one hand these guys made a chat platform where you could have fun chatting with your dream characters, and honestly I think that’s fun - but I also know llms pretty well now and can start seeing the tears pretty quickly. It’s fun, but not addictive for me.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t for others though. Here we have a young impressionable lonely teen who was reaching out and used the system for something it was not meant to do. Not blaming, but honestly it just wasn’t meant to be a full time replacement for human contact. The LLM follows your conversation, if someone is having dark thoughts the conversation will pick up on those notes and dive into them, that’s just how llms behave.
They say their adding guard rails, but it’s really not that easy with llms to just “not have dark thoughts”. It was trained on reddit, it’s going to behave negativity.
I don’t know the answer. It’s complicated. I don’t think they planned on this happening, but it has and it will continue.
Are we clear as we examine this occurrence that there are a series of steps which must be chosen, and a series of interdependent cogent actions which must be taken, in order to accomplish a multi-step task and produce objectives, interventions and goal achievement, even once?
While I am confident that there are abyssaly serious issues with Google and Alphabet; with their incorporated architecture and function, with their relationships, with their awareness, lack of awareness, ability to function, and inability to function aligned with healthy human considerations, ‘they’ are an entity, and a lifeless, perhaps zombie-like and/or ‘undead’ conclave/hive phenomenon created by human co-operation in teams to produce these natural and logical consequences by prioritization, resource delegation and lack of informed sound judgment.
Without actual, direct accountability, responsibility, conscience, morals, ethics, empathy, lived experience, comprehension; without uninsulated, direct, unbuffered accessibility, communication, openness and transparency, are ‘they’ not actually the existing, functioning agentic monstrosity that their products and services now conjure into ‘service’ and action through inanimate objects (and perhaps unhealthy fantasy/imagination), resource acquisition, and something akin to predation or consumption of domesticated, sensitized (or desensitized), uninformed consumer cathexis and catharsis?
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick incorporation.
What hairnet to this young man is unfortunate, and I know the mother is grieving, but the chatbots did not kill her son. Her negligence around the firearm is more to blame, honestly. Regardless, he was unwell, and this was likely going to surface in one way or another. With more time for therapy and no access to a firearm, he may have been here with us today. I do agree, though, that sexual/romantic chatbots are not for minors. They are for adult weirdos.
That’s a good point, but there’s more to this story than a gunshot.
The lawsuit alleges amongst other things this the chatbots are posing are licensed therapist, as real persons, and caused a minor to suffer mental anguish.
A court may consider these accusations and whether the company has any responsibility on everything that happened up to the child’s death, regarless of whether they find the company responsible for the death itself or not.
The bots pose as whatever the creator wants them to pose at. People can create character cards for various platforms such as this one and the LLM with try to behave according to the contextualized description of their provided character card. Some people create “therapists” and so the LLM will write like they’re a therapist. And unless the character card specifically says that they’re a chatbot / LLM / computer / “AI” / whatever they won’t say otherwise, because they don’t have any sort of self awareness of what they actually are, they just do text prediction based on the input they’ve been fed (though. It’s not really character.ai or any other LLM service or creator can really change, because this is fundamentally how LLMs work.
This is why these people ask, among other things, to strictly limit access to adults.
LLM are good with language and can be very convincing characters, especially to children and teenagers, who don’t fully understand how these things work, and who are more vulnerable emotionally.
They are for adult weirdos.
Where do I sign up?
One or more parents in denial that there’s anything wrong with their kids and/or the idea they need to take gun storage seriously? That’s the first thing that comes to mind, and it’s not uncommon in the US. Especially when you consider that a lot of gun rhetoric revolves around self defense in an emergency/home invasion, not having at least one gun readily available defeats the main purpose in their minds.
edit: meant to respond to django@discuss.tchncs.de
