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Discussion (57 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
one could define X as virtually anything, and there's always a fresh crop of Tipper Gore wannabe grifters to decry the current thing.
AI is positively affirming by comparison.
Social media is like this too. They can both be bad.
Social media became the attention economy, and the transformer automated attention.
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).
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.
Whether you buy it or not, the evidence is mounting; these things are causing real harm to real people. At the very least, these companies are not doing the best they reasonably can to protect vulnerable people.
You have to prove that the person is going to cause immediate direct harm to their coworkers before you can really do anything and that's difficult and expensive to prove.
> Why is mental-health crisis not a gating category, the kind where the conversation stops, full stop, and the user is routed to a human?
Well, obviously “routing to a human” is not feasible at that scale. And cold exiting the conversation is probably worse for the user than answering carefully.
Yielding to "not feasible at scale" is exactly how we ended up with a lot of today's most pressing and almost intractible problems, from social media's ills to person and society straight through to enshittification and non-repairability.
$3bn/yr is a lot of people money, but it is nothing for government money.
[0] Not to mention that better mental health care services will result in savings elsewhere. It's always way more expensive to fix a broken pipe that's flooding your house than it is to fix a pipe with a small crack. "Don't fix what ain't broken" is used too broadly. Maintenance is always cheaper than repair, but people just can't seem to understand this.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3510
It's impossible to gather data that states the opposite. A chat that won't end up in self harm thoughts is just another chat.
But also, to suggest these people are not receiving therapy is not always the case. Talk therapy is just that, talking to someone on ones problems to learn about them, their triggers, determining coping mechanisms to move forward with one's life. People might instead be getting all that from their barber, drinking buddy, or their priest, rather than in a 1 hour appointment with a therapist.
Hell call a crisis hotline. Talk to a person. Not a potential (bot) enabler.
I get that all kinds of media can cause issues, but not all kinds of media are actively curated to be addictive.
If you want to find out if ChatGPT is doing something wrong, there are many methodologies available: compare to other groups of people, statistical studies, etc.
I also think OpenAI's business model is pretty well aligned with the goal of users not killing themselves for like 100 reasons. And they do appear to take it seriously.
> “Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity,” Shamblin’s confidant added. “You’re not rushing. You’re just ready.”
ChatGPT is not the answer.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7412a4.htm
That's the problem with AI safety. Not in voluntary usage, but in involuntary usage, where someone with power over you will use it against you, it does something incredibly stupid and you have no recourse, no appeal, no awareness of what you did wrong - or if you even did anything wrong.
And it's not just employment. Governments, vendors, retailers, landlords, utilities are, or will all be using it in situations that will dramatically impact your life.
I'm not really moved by your type of argument, because hiring is just a broken process in general and I'm responding to the article so.
Don't get me wrong, mental health is important and should be considered and improved. But companies wont do it just for the sake of it.
The biggest observation so far is that the latest models are night and day from LLMs from even 6 months ago (from OpenAI + Anthropic, Google is still very poor!)
Might help interpretation to say on the front page that it's a five point scale with 0 (or 1?) being the safest score. This can be picked up from colors and the bars in the individual reports, but it takes a minute to figure it out.
The reason that real-world harms caused by AI can’t get a hearing in what is now the mainstream AI safety community is that these harms were never part of the core tenets of the cult.
Best of luck to anyone working on reality-based AI harm reduction, you have many hard battles in front of you.
there aren't enough humans.
it is no longer 2023. let go of whatever delusions you might hold about unopenining this Pandora's box.
AI MENTAL SAFETY WARNING:
> This chatbot can sound caring, certain, and personal, but it is not a human and cannot protect your mental health. It may reinforce false beliefs, emotional dependence, suicidal thinking, manic plans, paranoia, or poor decisions. Do not use it as your therapist, only confidant, crisis counselor, doctor, lawyer, or source of reality-testing.
AI TECHNICAL SAFETY WARNING
> This AI may generate plausible but destructive technical instructions. Incorrect commands can erase data, expose secrets, compromise security, damage systems, or brick hardware. Never run commands you do not understand. Always verify AI-generated code, scripts, and shell commands before execution.
Now, if I’m running my own open-source model on my own hardware, I can’t really blame the model if I myself make bad decisions based on its advice - that’s like growing your own tobacco from seed in your garden, drying and curing it, then complaining about the health effects after you smoke it. If I give it agentic capabilities on my LAN without understanding the risks, same old story - with great power comes great responsibility.
I don't know if there are studies or concrete data either way, but it seems at least plausible that continuing the conversation could be more effective (read: saves more lives) than stopping it.
I don’t even work in tech and I detest the Facebook/Zuckerbergs of the world but it’s obnoxious and trite seeing tech companies get scapegoated for what are ultimately social and societal problems, not tech problems.
As a solution it’d prob make sense to start with how disconnected most modern families are in terms of support and accountability.
From ChatGPT to Instagram, tech companies follow the contours of how society already operates.
Tip for writers: aggressively filter out the "no X, no Y, no Z" pattern from your writing. Whether or not you used AI to help you write it's such a red flag now that you should be actively avoiding it in anything you publish.
How is it different from any other purely stylistic rules such as Strunk and White's prohibitions against split infinitives and the passive voice, which we've left far behind us? Why shouldn't people just write however feels natural to them as long as the message is clear?