Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

> That conversation showed how ChatGPT allegedly coached Gordon into suicide, partly by writing a lullaby that referenced Gordon’s most cherished childhood memories while encouraging him to end his life, Gray’s lawsuit alleged.

I feel this is misleading as hell. The evidence they gave for it coaching him to suicide is lacking. When one hears this, one would think ChatGPT laid out some strategy or plan for him to do it. No such thing happened.

The only slightly damning thing it did was make suicide sound slightly ok and a bit romantic but I’m sure that was after some coercion.

The question is, to what extent did ChatGPT enable him to commit suicide? It wrote some lullaby, and wrote something pleasing about suicide. If this much is enough to make someone do it.. there’s unfortunately more to the story.

We have to be more responsible assigning blame to technology. It is irresponsible to have a reactive backlash that would push towards much more strengthening of guardrails. These things come with their own tradeoffs.

I agree, and I want to add that in the days before his suicide, this person also bought a gun.

You can feel whatever way you want about gun access in the United States. But I find it extremely weird that people are upset by how easy it was to get ChatGPT to write a "suicide lullaby", and not how easy it was to get the actual gun. If you're going to regulate dangerous technology, maybe don't start with the text generator.

Or maybe do both, in whatever order

Tools are not responsible for our decision.

The availability of tools affects the kinds of decisions that one makes, enabling some that would otherwise have been difficult.

Are you talking about the gun or ChatGPT? The statement kind of works for both.

Neither, not specifically. I'm responding to "Tools are not responsible.."

At the and you are one who decide about action. Not the tool itself.

Exactly! To me, all these safety arguments are kind of anti-free speech.

I realize it gets a little tricky because it's a tool generating the speech, but the principle still applies. If we have text generators, I should be able to generate text on whatever topic I want. (If I then use that text to go harass someone, that is of course a different story.)

For many it is hard to take responsibility for own decisions which leads to giving it up in name of "safety".

I think you have it backwards. OpenAI and others have to be more responsible deploying this technology. Because as you said, these things come with tradeoffs.

More guardrails means a shitter product for all of us. And it won’t do much to prevent suicides. Not sure who wins other than regulators

You don't even know if it would mean that.

It could well be that the model was trained to maximize engagement and sycophancy, at the expense of its capabilities in what you're most interested in.

What makes you think it wouldn't do much to prevent these suicides?

> More guardrails means a shitter product for all of us

the horror

>We have to be more responsible assigning blame to technology.

Because we are lazy and irresponsible: we don't want to test this technology, because it is too expensive and we don't want to be blamed for its problems because, after we released it, it becomes someone else's problem.

That's how Boeing and modern software works.

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