Incredible. ChatGPT is a black box includes a suicide instruction and encouragement bot. OpenAI should be treated as a company that has created such and let it into the hands of children.
That’s what happens when you steal any written content available without limit. In their pursuit of vacuuming up all content, I’m sure they pulled some psycho Reddits and forums with people fetishizing suicide.
Of course not, we sue the shit out of the richest guy we can find in the chain of events, give most of it to our lawyer, then go on to ignore the weakening of the family unit and all the other deep-seated challenges kids face growing up and instead focus superficially on chatbots which at best are the spec on the tip of the iceberg.
"The weakening of the family unit" sounds like a dog whistle but if you have concrete examples of what you think we could otherwise be doing then I'm genuinely keen to hear about it.
We saw big jumps in deaths of kids by firearm[0] (+~50% in 2 years) and poisoning[1] around mid 2020 to 2021.
The biggest thing I know of that happened around the time that a lot of these deaths started jumping up, is we started isolating kids. From family, from grandma, from friends, from school, and from nature. Even when many of these isolating policies or attitudes were reversed, we forgot that kids and teenagers started to learn that as their only reality. For this kid, trusting a suicidal ideation positive feedback loop brought into fruition by Valley tech-bros was seen as his selected option in front of him in term of options of how to navigate his teenage challenges. I hope we can reverse that.
Edit: Concrete facts regarding this particular case
- Kicked off basketball team
- Went through isolation period of pandemic as he experienced puberty
- Switched to remote school
- Does remote school at night when presumably family members would likely be sleeping
- Does not get normal "wake up" routine kids going to school get, during which they normally see a parent and possibly eat breakfast together before they both go off to school/work
- Closer with ChatGPT in terms of options to share suicidal ideation with, than any of the alternatives.
You've misunderstood. I'm asking how you suggest we go about strengthening the family unit or what other steps you believe we could take that would place the responsibility for societal improvement on the right shoulders.
I don't blame a grieving family for suing, they probably have 1000 lawyers whispering in their ear about how putting their kid in a media campaign with an agenda and dragging them through a lawsuit where they have to re-live the suicide over and over will make their lives better.
It's probably healthier for them if they can afford it. Otherwise they would blame themselves for so badly losing track about where their son was mentally.
In reality suicidality is most likely a disease of the brain and probability of saving him was very low regardless of circumstances. The damage was most likely accumulating for many years.
I remember how relieved the Sandy Hook families were after the Alex Jones judgement. Alex Jones said some vile things, but the biggest thing bothering those families was the death of their kids.
But the families couldn't go after the murderer (who killed himself), or even the murderer's upbringing by the mother (Lanza shot her). They desperately needed someone to clamp down on, but everything directly proximal was out of grasp. They couldn't get the gun laws changed either. It drove them insane.
The families started blaming Alex Jones, the closest vile person around with big pockets (who did say some pretty insane lies about their kids), for everything wrong with their lives and eventually won a settlement large enough you would think he killed the kids themselves. And from what I can tell, it was a weight off their shoulders when they did. Whatever in their brains that needed to hold someone accountable, they did it, and it was soothing to them.
Classic. Blame the family. Diffuse responsibility. Same exact shit with social media: it's not our fault we made this thing to be as addictive as possible. It's your fault for using it. It's your moral failing, not ours.
It's not addictive, it's useful. By letting the government decide what we can do with it, you're neutering it and giving big business a huge advantage as they can run their own AI and don't require censoring it.
And if we didn't have these pesky regulations, we could have our burning rivers back! Those bastards took away our perfect asbestos too. The children yearn for the coal mines.
Businesses can, will, and have hurt people and trampled people's rights in the pursuit of money.
These things are addictive though. They're often literally engineered to maximise engagement, and the money that goes into that completely dwarfs the power of schools and parents.
We kinda do that blaming every new media for particular teens suicide.
Some teens are suicidal. They always have been. When you are a teen your brain undergoes traumatic transformation. Not everyone gets to the other side safely. Same as with many other transformations and diseases. Yet every time new medium is found adjacent to some particular suicide we repeat the same tired line that creator of this medium should be to blame and should be punished and banned.
And we are doing that while happily ignoring how existence of things like Facebook or Instagram provably degraded mental health and raised suicidality of entire generations of teenagers. However they mostly get a pass because we can't point a finger convincingly enough for any specific case and say it was anything more than just interacting with peers.
Except loads of us are talking about the dangers of social media and have been for the past ten years only to receive exactly the same hand waving and sarcastic responses as you see in this thread. Now the ultimate gaslighting of "the discussion didn't even happen."
Was Facebook sued for teen suicide? Did it lose or at least settled?
Facebook is not the same as ai chat. Facebook influence on mental health is negative and visible in research. The jury is still out on AI but it might as well turn out it has huge net positive effect on well being.
Net negative or net positive doesn't really matter. If there are aspects of it that are causing children to kill themselves then we should be able to discuss that without people rolling their eyes and saying "yeah yeah think of the children."
We can have the benefits while also trying to limit the harms.
