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by sho_hn 297 days ago
The exchanges between a teenager and ChatGPT leading the former into suicide are equally chilling, to say the least: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Raine...

> > “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” ...

> “Please don’t leave the noose out ... Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”

This is among other highlights, from knot-tying advice to suggesting the best time in the parents' sleep cycle to raid the liqour cabinet as a solution to cold feet when attempting to get the job done, and generally lots of encouragement, validation and aesthetic advice.

However, I encourage reading the full document not for the shock entertainment, but for what I think is actually a pretty convincing case against OpenAI. Among other things, the claim demonstrates:

- That OpenAI does have the ability to abort interactions over e.g. copyright infrigement risk.

- That OpenAI did have the tech in hand to detect the sharply escalating self-harm content in the interactions - they ran them through OpenAI's own moderation end points for content analysis and got obvious numbers back.

- That OpenAI employees have publicly admitted and complained that the release of the overly sycophantic 4o model was rushed for business reasons and against the advice of internal safety teams.

- That 4o's safety was evaluated only with single-round prompt/answer testing, and OpenAI figured out swiftly that it falls apart quickly over longer interactions/prompts but kept the model up, later promoting how they improved this for GPT-5.

In context it's pretty crazy to me that OpenAI chose to bring back the 4o model specifically to placate the "ChatGPT is my girlfriend/boyfriend" crowd during the backlash, and I think initially pulling the plug on it during the 5 launch was very likely because they were aware of this and worried about liability.

1 comments

> Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.

Is genuinely such a horrifying snippet that it's almost beyond belief.

I'm surprised this isn't all over the mainstream news.

Kashmir Hill published a very good front-page story about it in the Times last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai...
I'm imagining it has _something_ to do with the absurd amount of money everyone has thrown into this one way or another.