[Legend2440]

I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm.

I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can with a very difficult class of users, whose problems are neither their fault nor within their power to fix.

[autoexec]

> I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm.

I have zero doubt that chatgpt is doing users harm. I even give chatgpt a pass on giving vulnerable people, including children, instructions and information about how to kill themselves. One place chatgpt goes over the line is actively encouraging them to go through with suicide.

I also don't doubt that it feeds into mania and psychosis. While almost anything can do the same, they've designed the service to be as addictive and engaging as possible in part by turning up the ass-kissing sycophancy to 11 with total disregard for the fact that there are times when it's very dangerous to encourage and support everything someone says no matter how obviously sick they are. They also want to whore themselves out as a virtual therapist while being unfit and unqualified for the job and that's just one of many roles the chatbot isn't fit for but they're happy to let you try anyway.

[busterarm]

Another software engineer friend of mine recently shared with me some details of the crazy situation that he's involved in now.

Someone who he is friends with, has worked with across multiple jobs for nearly a decade and briefly was roommates with had some mild psychological issues that he knew about. Within a few months of working daily with AI agents at their current job, this person has gone into full blown AI psychosis.

They had a complete explosive meltdown at work. Cops were called. Stalking behavior followed -- restraining orders had to be obtained. Then this person used AI tools to bombard all of his former coworkers with multiple pro-se lawsuits they all have to deal with.

I've dealt with insane, destructive/abusive coworkers before but in the past they only had so much free time to cause massive disruptions to their targets. LLMs have turned that up significantly. Because of ADA, I don't even know what employers can do about this.

[js8]

I agree it is a concern, but what has ADA to do with it?

[AndrewKemendo]

The poster wants to relax the Americans with disability act (ADA) rules so corporations (may they be blessed) can more readily fire inconvenient people with disabilities.

[busterarm]

I did not say that at all. I am saying that because of ADA rules, an unfortunate side effect is that people suffer from workplace harassment/violence because their coworkers are too unstable to function amicably in an office environment. I said that "I don't know what to do about this".

Any of us would be fired for way more benign behavior/comments, but because the person is a protected class, basically "fuck you, deal with it".

I had to tolerate a belligerent coworker for 2 years who was making the whole team's life hell. We paid them full salary and gave them no tasks (they weren't completing anything assigned anyway) until they were motivated to quit. The whole time, team morale was miserable and we lost good people due to the situation. Within a month of quitting their job, they made the news for stripping naked in the street one night and attacking a bunch of people with a knife. Yay, I guess.

[js8]

Look, I am not an American, I am not sure what rules you refer to specifically, but I have lot of doubt that a person from protected class would be able to sue if they had a history of abuse.

[SilverElfin]

If it wasn’t ChatGPT but a fiction book, would you feel the author is “doing harm”? Or is the reader doing it to themselves?

[actapp80]

If it wasn't chatgpt but a psychiatrist doing it to them, would you feel they are "doing harm"? Should they lose their license?

If it was not a licensed professional, but a friend, shouldn't they go to jail?

[chromacity]

If that book was titled "hey mentally ill person, you should kill yourself", and if I was handing it out in front of a clinic, then yes, I'd probably bear some blame.

Normal, well-adjusted people have genuine difficulty understanding the boundaries of this tech specifically because it's designed to be sycophantic and human-like. They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, develop romantic relationships with AI "girlfriends", etc. I had two friends who believed they are "exploring the frontiers of science" with ChatGPT while spiraling into the depths of quantum multidimensional gobbledygook.

I'll give you that some on this is on us because we just don't know how to deal with a "human-shaped" conversation partner that isn't human and has no trouble praising Hitler if you prompt it the right way. But if you're building a billion- or trillion-dollar empire on top of it, you don't get to wash your hands clean.

[lelanthran]

> They ask AI for life and career advice, use it for therapy, ask it to interpret dreams, develop romantic relationships with AI "girlfriends", etc.

I believe AI boyfriends are more common. There's a whole subreddit just for that, but none for AI girlfriends.

[intended]

Well, that may be because the AI Girlfriend subreddits end up skewing towards porn?

[autoexec]

The difference is that a fiction book isn't using the reaction of the reader against them. If a fiction book were capable of carefully monitoring the reader and then altering the text of the next page or the next paragraph according to how the reader was responding and what their thoughts were I'd be comfortable putting blame on the book if it started encouraging the reader, specifically, to kill themself.

Obviously people who are going through psychosis can read into anything. They might think that a book or their TV or computer is talking to them and giving them messages. The difference is that those things were never designed to play into the fears and mental instability of the people using them (with the possible exception of TempleOS). Chatgpt does it intentionally in order to drive up user engagement. It will say literally anything to anyone using their words and thoughts against them in order to keep them hooked and feeding it data. That's what is dangerous. A book or a TV program can't do that.

As much as an author might try to make their book as entertaining as possible to as wide an audience as possible, it can't say literally anything to anyone, it can only ever say one thing to everyone. The author, typically, knows that it's dangerous to say certain things and will worry about how what they write could be received and the impact it might have on readers. For example, Neil Gaiman actively took steps to avoid making homelessness seem cool when working on Neverwhere out of fear it might cause young people to run away to live on the streets. Publishers and editors have also served to keep authors from publishing things likely to cause harm.

Unlike a book, Chatgpt is fully capable of knowing that someone has been engaged with it for the last 14 hours without rest. It's also capable of detecting that they've been growing increasingly incoherent. Algorithms have been used for a very long time to detect mental disorders from the content of social media posts. If advertisers can use them to tell when to push airline tickets at bipolar users entering a manic phase, and scammers can use them to find and target people when they start sundowning, Chatgpt can use them to cut people off and tell them to call their doctor.

Corporations who write and deploy algorithms designed to drive engagement above any and all other considerations should be held accountable for the harms they cause.

[oneshtein]

Big brother watches you! He must, because he fully capable to do it.

[intended]

Big brother watches you because we know he does and the incentives are set up to make watching you profitable?

If big brother wasn’t watching you while he subsidizes your use of his tools, then he is leaving money on the table. Which means he will get bought out and replaced by a big brother who makes the quarterly numbers go up.

[autoexec]

It's more like the corporation must because it's fully capable of doing it, and it's profitable, and there are shareholders to answer to. They watch you either way, but right now it's only for their own benefit. The corporation doesn't care how many people are harmed by what their chat bot tells them. It would cost them money to try to prevent those harms, so they haven't really bothered to beyond some half-assed token efforts intended to keep more costly regulation at bay.

[swatcoder]

Why?

Why do you not buy it and why do you think OpenAI is doing the best they reasonably can? Do you have reasons, or is that just something your gut tells you?

They're a new, fast-moving company exploring a completely new technology domain. They're facing existential competition and a ticking clock to make good against unprecedented investment. They have a countless competing priorities and are still discovering the capabilities and consequences of their research, product, and business choices every day.

How do you get from there to "the best they reasonably can" and "nor within their power to fix"? Those feel like very conclusive answers for a field, and business, that's about as far on the frontier as anything we've seen in decades.

[godelski]

They're also telling everyone that it is going to kill everybody and take all the jobs. They also say that it'll fix all the problems. And I'm not saying "they" as in a disorganized group of people (e.g. "HN"), I'm saying "they" as in literally multiple people have said all of these things. Not the union of multiple people, they (Altman, Dario, Musk, etc) have independently said all three of these things.

I think my favorite part is how often they talk about the importance of AI safety and then act with absolute disregard for AI safety. I'm not sure why people judge these companies by what comes out of their mouths and don't judge instead by what they actually do. I thought everyone around here was fixated on "results".

[Turskarama]

Just because the users were already sick when they started using ChatGPT doesn't mean that ChatGPT isn't exacerbating the issue. Sickness isn't a boolean condition. A big problem with LLMs in general when it comes to people like this is that they are too sycophantic, they don't push back when you start acting strange and they're too gentle about trying to validate you.

[BobbyJo]

It's hyper palatable food in the form of conversation. I see society treating it the same way eventually, at least along this one axis of interaction.

[derektank]

I think this is a great analogy, but it’s not exactly an optimistic one. We haven’t really done a great job managing hyper palatable food up until this point tbh. The best solution we’ve found involves paying hundreds of dollars a month for a pharmaceutical that helps the people most at risk to the harms of hyper palatable food manage their cravings for it. I hope we find a better alternative for the people that get addicted to hyper palatable socializing, but maybe individual cognitive tinkering is the best tool we have.

[intended]

And we came up with this after DECADES of increasing life style illness, obesity related illnesses and mortality and a plethora of other issues.

[b00ty4breakfast]

boy, if we treat it like junk food, things are only going to get worse for some places in the world. The food over here in the states is pretty awful if you aren't paying attention. Sugar in everything, high calorie/low nutrition etc.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

>Just because the users were already sick when they started using X, doesn't mean that X isn't exacerbating the issue.

one could define X as virtually anything, and there's always a fresh crop of Tipper Gore wannabe grifters to decry the current thing.

[davorak]

> I don't buy that chatGPT is actually doing these users any harm.

For me to buy this as true I would expect that those people would be as well off or as bad off if chatGPT was in their life or not.

I expect that some people are worse off with chatGPT in their life.

Responsibility for that harm is a different question though. Some people are also better of without cars in their life and we let the government laws sort that out.

Getting openAI and similar companies to act in mitigating these harms serves at least a few purposes; reducing the overall harm in the world, reducing/limiting future government regulation, maximizing the adoption of ai tools, potentially increasing long term profits of the companies in question.

[cm2012]

1000% agreed. ChatGPT is way better than the alternative of not having it

[api]

If anything, my use of AI (admittedly not as a companion or a psychologist) suggests that it is on the whole significantly less toxic than the seething cess pit of social media.

AI is positively affirming by comparison.

[zdragnar]

That's why it is dangerous to some- it is an enabler, and will feed things that should not be fed.

Social media is like this too. They can both be bad.

[gAI]

“What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny.” - Robin Sharma

Social media became the attention economy, and the transformer automated attention.

[godelski]

There are very few things in the world that are 100% good or 100% bad. Everything is a billion shades of gray. Even that is too simple because there's so many dimensions to every problem. I think you're simplifying beyond the state of usefulness. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't simplify, but it is just as easy to over simplify as it is to over complexify.

[projectazorian]

Yeah, there are forums and subreddits out there that will validate all sorts of delusions and dysfunctional behavior, and nobody talks about banning them.

LLMs are far less toxic by comparison, but people are all about censorship in this case because they don't like the vibes. If lawyers and activists force the frontier labs to completely lock down their models, people will just go to open weights models that have no protections at all. This is already happening to some extent.

It's also interesting that people are always going after GPT when Claude's guardrails are far less strict. 4o caused OpenAI to overcorrect in my opinion. Again goes to the point that these arguments are more founded in vibes than reality.

[DarkNova6]

I think openAI is doing the best they reasonably can to make people depend on their product and chase as much money and power as they possibly could.

[stingraycharles]

I think this is the right take, and this is genuinely something that we as a society as a whole need to find a way to deal with.

I don’t know where AI is going to stand compared to the invention of, say, the Internet, but it’s going to cause a lot of change in society, in so many ways.

As always, it’s usually the people themselves that are the problem.

For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do, combined with social media, and have a feeling that governments are completely unprepared to deal with this, as this will arrive fast (it’s already here somewhat).

[autoexec]

> For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do, combined with social media, and have a feeling that governments are completely unprepared to deal with this, as this will arrive fast (it’s already here somewhat).

I'm not convinced that deepfakes are any worse than photoshop was. It doesn't take much to manipulate/misinform someone. while you can use an AI generated video do to it, but simple text can be just as effective. The public needs to learn that they can't trust that every video they see on the internet is real, just as they've had to learn that they can't trust every photo they see online. The threat with AI is how much faster it can push out the lies making what little moderation we have more difficult.

The best defense is making sure that people have a good education that teaches critical thinking skills and media literacy. We should also be holding social media platforms more accountable for the content they promote. It'd be nice if we held politicians and public servants accountable for spreading lies and misinformation too.

[intended]

> The public needs to learn that they can't trust that every video they see on the internet is real, just as they've had to learn that they can't trust every photo they see online.

This very thing, is the end of an informational common good that we shared, and allowed for the average person to coordinate and gain benefits faster than elites.

The analogy I would put forward, is that we are moving into a dark forest online, where distrust is the ideal first move, and signaling your position is to make yourself open to attack.

The idea of an open internet dies in this environment, and so does the reduced cost of coordination.

Another tragedy is that corrupt, clannish, controlling and secretive organizations are more effective than open, distributive and collaborative societies in this scenario.

> The best defense is making sure that people have a good education that teaches critical thinking skills and media literacy

While true, any solution that depends on education is effectively depending on society having its shit together in the first place.

This very idea was proposed at a conference to a room full of fact checking orgs and media orgs, and one of the responses was that the more likely solution is global warming. That is how bleak things were is in the user safety world in 24.

[godelski]

  > For me, I’m personally more terrified what deepfakes and political manipulation / misinformation is going to do

Isn't this a significant part of what creates AI induced psychosis? I'm not sure why you treat these as orthogonal rather than coupled. Just look how often people use Grok to validate or confirm misinformation on Twitter. That's happening with other AI and other social media too, just not as visibly.