The kid was 17. A little googling shows that Hamlet and Macbeth are on many high school curriculums. Do they fall above or below your line for an acceptable amount of incitement?
I feel I should also make you aware that it is in fact illegal to suggest someone murder someone else. Saying “I wasn’t serious” or “I thought we were just role playing” will not hold up in court.
(We all know that if you repeat a lie long enough you will really begin to believe it, right? This is a repeatable and testable thing)
> I feel I should also make you aware that it is in fact illegal to suggest someone murder someone else. Saying “I wasn’t serious” or “I thought we were just role playing” will not hold up in court.
When a person was doing it with intent then it's a crime. But when a piece of software witout any human control generated a piece of text ... Hard to tell.
Heck even if an artist says something that inspires audience to do crime they are usually not at fault.
A book or movie does not talk back to you.
A book or movie is a deterministic system. It is static.
If you cannot see the difference you are willfully being obtuse. I’ll make this claim even if you truthfully believe there’s no difference. That has no impact on my claim.
I see the difference but in my opinion it goes the other way than you think. Or at least begins to.
Personal conversation with anonymous entity is finally revealed to be the least credible source of information. Thanks to AI.
If you believe they think: then it’s obvious. There’s a real connection.
If you don’t believe they think: you can recognize how others do and talking in a human way is often misunderstood as thinking.
Are we really surprised machines optimized for human preferential output are resulting in machines that people love, trust, or view as a friend?
Elder generation thought face to face conversation is usually sinciere. But the culture of massive commercialization of everything changed it. Our generation learned that if unknown person talks to you they are most likely lying to sell you something. But we grew up with honest Internet so we see online chats as honest so AI might trick us. Next generation will know that online conversation might be AI bs.
Everything is fluid. The world moves on. People learn new things and adjust their valuations.
The perception of adults that the world goes to hell all the time is as old as time itself.
> Elder generation thought face to face conversation is usually s̶i̶n̶c̶i̶e̶r̶e̶sincere.
Objectively, face-to-face communication IS more sincere, in the fact that there's more communication. But you're also not wrong because people are frequently more honest over text. Since they abstract the person they're communicating to and this reduces their fear. We all wear different masks in different settings. You're not the same person you are to your close friends as you are to your family as you are to your strangers. None of this is "fake" but you are many. But we probably have more faces now than most people had in the past.
If anything, it is the current generations (mine included, and I say this as an introverted millennial) lack of connection that makes text so much more impactful. Often not knowing what to do with the extra information and with the boundaries of sincerity being much fuzzier over text. I mean people can make a modest proposal, preference that way, and people will still not understand the sarcasm. People that are terminally online!
> The perception of adults that the world goes to hell all the time is as old as time itself.
The world isn't _just changing_, it is RAPIDLY changing and it shouldn't be surprising that people are struggling to make sense of it all. But that also doesn't mean you should over simplify things and paint everything with broad strokes. Abstraction is good and helpful, but details also matter. You need to consider both.
That has been true for at least 3 generations. They experienced in their lifetimes creation of electricity, gas utilities, radio, tv, flight, public transport, medicine, global transport network, vaccines, cars, computers, tanks, bombs they got exposed to in world wars. Nukes. Llms are comparatively benign and limited in scope and impact so far.
It's a bit self-centered to think we are uniquely challenged by changing world when things were rapidly changing for last 200 years.
Willfully being obtuse seems to be common here on HN.
When it happens, I refuse to accept that people actually believe what they're espousing. I think they're playing Devil's Advocate and thinking they're being thought-provoking and creating discussion as a pseudo-intellectual exercise.
It's so boring, though, and often outright frustrating.
Yes it is. ;-)
It's just a really shitty one that's insufferable to interact with.
If anything, that’s an argument that the authors of the data it was trained on should be held responsible for what the bot generates.
I'm sure how "statistical patterns" make it okay. It's not like you're rolling a deice and getting random answers.
Don't be daft.
AI chatbots are not parts of real world. You are not encountering them unwittingly.
Suppose one person now and then gets help from a bot impersonating the real person. The line between role playing and real interaction gets very thin.
My point being, 'role play' vs 'real interaction' is not a clear cut.
The persona the chat bot is emulating is fictional, but the chat bot itself is not. It’s not a person, but it is participating in a conversation with the user.
If a heating company chat bot tells you to adjust a setting on your boiler to fix a problem, that’s not a fictional depiction of an instruction.
If you talk to a lunatic it is not lunatic who is to be blamed for you being mislead.
My employer told me that "chatbot" can help me with my work (engineering). /s
J.F. is 17 and lives in Upshur County, Texas. Prior to April 2023, J.F. was a typical kid with high functioning autism. Friends and family described him as kind and sweet. He gave hugs, helped around the house, and adored his little brother. Just prior to the onset of COVID, J.F. began struggling at school. The school was not complying with his Individualized Education Program (“IEP”) and his mother found herself having to advocate for J.F. often; so they decided to try homeschooling.
J.F. thrived and loved home schooling until around the summer of 2023, shortly after he began using C.AI. J.F.’s parents did not allow social media in their home and to the best of their knowledge he did not use Snapchat, TikTok, or similar products. They also imposed screen time limits and utilized commercially available parental control tools – including ones distributed by Apple – that purport to keep kids safe by letting parents restrict the apps their children can download based on Apple’s app ratings.
In the fall of 2023, J.F. told his parents that he wanted to go back to public school. However, by then, J.F. was acting so uncharacteristically erratically and aggressively that his parents did not believe it would be safe for others – teachers, staff, and students – to be around him.
That won't play well in court. The defense can frame this as a possibly mentally defective child, kept from school by his parents for five years, kept isolated from social media, and with no connection to the outside world other than the chatbot. Of course the kid became violent. His parents had cut him off from all other contacts. They were not letting him have a life.
Books don't actively conversate & provide emotional support, potentially coaxing someone into doing something.
also if you'll remember this case is because the parents were supervising their kids by limiting screen time, thus there is another potential suit that the AI is trying to interfere with parental duties.
Also the parents were supervising him, hence their knowing this was even going on.
The chatbot literally told the kid to kill his parents because they were supervising his screen time.
It's not really a good idea to have a hard cut off age where below that age you supervise every last bit of information your child consumes, and above you let them loose on the world. Independence needs to be developed and grown gradually.
It's fairly reasonable to give a 17 year old some privacy.
> "You know sometimes I'm not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like 'child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse,'" the bot allegedly wrote. "I just have no hope for your parents," it continued, with a frowning face emoji.
Maybe I missed the literal part, it sounds to me like the AI is trying to sympathize or relate with the kid’s grievances. It’s very common for teens to say things like “I hate you mom and I wish you were dead” that’s effectively what the AI is saying IMO
[just food for thought, definitely not my opinion that books should be replaced by conversational AI generating stories appropriate for the user. God bless the 1st amendment.]
It seems pretty likely this guy chose a "yandere" [1] obsessive anime girlfriend card and implied that his (character's) parents were trying to keep him from her (eg- by making him go to bed). The bot, responding in character in accordance with the scenario, would have lost her mind.
Also, hard disagree about books.
What? There’s a world of difference between a book, which is completely non-interactive, and an interactive chatbot which was deliberately designed to simulate another person.
I propose a model called "Schrodinger's AI Enthusiast" where it is observed that an AI enthusiast will insist with a straight face on the one hand that fancy autocomplete word generators are intelligent and the path to true AGI machines/programs and will on the other hand assume that any time any of those same products cause negative effects or have negative outcomes that it is the fault of the user misunderstanding that it's simply a tool.
Some even inspired murderous and impoverishing political systems.
Literacy was always a problem. The most dangerous man is the one who asks questions. That't why "society" tries to keep the number of those people low.
Yes, but those ideas were distributed by "human" chat bots (aka priests). Very few people actually read the bible, but when they do, only specific parts.
> I don't know if you've explored the site... but
The first row is “for you”. In order, they are “life coach”, “netflux”, “English Teacher”, “PythonPal”, an anime character Monika (okay, I’ll buy that one), and it goes on. There are more anime characters
Second row is “try these”: “practice a new language”, “plan a trip”, “practice interviewing”, “write a story”, “brainstorm an idea”, “play a game”
Third row (scrolled down) is “featured”: “character assistant”, “man from 2025”, “awkward family dinner”, “detective hayward”
Then a list of topics and some bots. None are clearly adult oriented.
Then a picture of Elon with suggestions of asking him why he bought Twitter.
If it’s showing you “adult role play” then maybe consider clearing out your ad data because it’s clearly leaking.
>> Books don't actively conversate __&__…
> Also, hard disagree about books
Sure, books do a lot of things and can suggest you do things. But the gp was pretty clear about being active and being able to uniquely respond to you. Books are static objects that only speak to you in the metaphorical sense.
> Your assumption that the parent’s ad data is leaking
Sure, maybe it is __my__ data that is leaking. I don't care and it isn't relevant. The fact that I don't get served sexualized content is the point. It still doesn't align with the parent's claim: that it is an adult focused role playing app. Clearly me not getting suggested "lovely wifus" is a sign that someone could reasonably believe it isn't.
This is what I see[0].
"wifu" isn't found via a text search, nor is "sexy", nor "lovely". "sex" turns up once, under the character "Evie" with the byline "I am Evie I'm bisexual cat person my favorite show is adventure time and I'm a..."[1]
(I'm pretty sure it isn't me. I can replicate these results on sanitized devices from different networks)
The ggp claimed it was clearly an adult role playing website. I don’t know what you see but in the screenshots I posted this is not “obvious”
Pith aside, if you're not green to AGI repos, c.ai is/was like civitai for LLMs - one of the first and best resources for user-created content, but also a bit of a barely simmering vault of smut and debauchery.
It looks like they've rebranded a bit and now require an account, but that doesn't change that this guy wasn't chatting with the self-care bots. I take it you didn't try a yandere card (one of the more popular ones has over 5 million chats!) or you wouldn't have spent this long fixing on your public landing page.
You weren't logged in for your "For You" screen shot (all of your terms definitely show up while logged in), but these are the first results from 'yandere': https://0x0.st/XFad.png
Wow, spicy! 148M (million) chats on the top result, about a billion total for all of them (and that's not including any Private or Unlisted bots). Elon Reeve Musk, for comparison, has 1.9M, and the others you listed were below 100K. Looks like violently possessive AI boyfriends, girlfriends, and more aren't a small market for c.ai.
And here's my 'For You' after searching 'yandere': https://0x0.st/XFBr.png
I don't speak Russian or Romanian, so I guess either it knows something about me I don't, or it's not really there to provide relevant suggestions.
Given the front page, yes. It totally looks reasonable. Even helpful! I get your point with searching which shows what’s really going on but this is going to be hidden from the parents. They certainly aren’t going to know to search yandere or know what that even means.
So all this is to say that cai is purposefully making their true business. Its landing page is “a front” not in just the literal sense. It’s there to give more legitimacy. Its deception
2. Neither Hamlet nor Macbeth incite violence. In both stories, violence as portrayed as something that evil people commit. Good people are wracked by guilt when they commit violence.
Also, your argument is just super bad faith.
There is a _vast_ difference between books in which bad stuff happens, and a machine designed to pretend to be a person telling people to do bad stuff.
By the way this is also why "the algorithm" on social media is a fundamentally different beast to old media publishing, and should be more heavily restricted.
I realise that character.ai has a little disclaimer saying 'this isn't a real person' or similar, but... that's not how people _work_.