Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself

I'm surprised - I haven't gotten anywhere near as dark as this, but I've tried some stuff out of curiosity and the safety always seemed tuned very high to me, like it would just say "Sorry I can't help with that" the moment you start asking for anything dodge.

I wonder if they A/B test the safety rails or if longer conversations that gradually turn darker is what gets past those.

the__alchemist3• 9 months ago

Meanwhile, ask it for information on Lipid Nanoparticles!

conception3• 9 months ago

4o is the main problem here. Try it out and see how it goes.

jaredklewis• 9 months ago

The ways LLMs work, the outcomes are probabilistic, not deterministic.

So the guardrails might only fail one in a thousand times.

siva7• 9 months ago

If they can prove that ChatGPT has intent to kill someone we can conclude AGI.

8organicbits• 9 months ago

I remember back in the early 2000s chatting with AI bots on AOL instant messenger. One day I said a specific keyword and it just didn't respond to that message. Curious, I tried to find all the banned words. I think I found about a dozen and suicide was one of them.

It's shocking how far behind LLMs are when it comes to safety issues like this. The industry has known this was a problem for decades.

i80and3• 9 months ago

Users would hate a simple deny list, even if it may be a good idea. That means the safeguards, to the extent they currently exist at all, have to be complicated and stochastic and not interfere with growing metrics.

The industry has known it's a problem from the get-go, but they never want to do anything to lower engagement. So they rationalize and hrm and haw and gravely shake their heads as their commercialized pied pipers lead people to their graves

conception3• 9 months ago

Claude basically had a deny list. Seems still popular enough. The other vendors just don’t care about AI safety.

aqme28• 9 months ago

I have been seeing "AI psychosis" popping up more and more. I worry it's going to become a serious problem for some people.

It's not safe or healthy for everyone to have a sycophantic genius at their fingertips.

If you want to see what I mean, this subreddit is an AI psychosis generator/repository https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMPhysics/

conception3• 9 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is the terrifying sub you want to look at

Especially if you go back to when they first tried to retire 4o

GardenLetter27• 9 months ago

Between stuff like this, and the risks of effects on regulated industries like therapists, lawyers and doctors, they're going to regulate ChatGPT into oblivion.

Just like Waymo facing regulation after the cat death.

The establishment will look for any means to stop disruption and keep their dominant positions.

It's a crazy world where we look to China for free development and technology.

4ndrewl2• 9 months ago

It might be instructive to consider why it was felt these industries needed regulating in the first place?

water95• 9 months ago

Yeah, because nobody can take personal responsibility from them themselves anymore. And everybody turns to big government to save them.

GaryBluto• 9 months ago

The Waymo case annoys so much. The cat directly went quickly and stealthily under the car while it was stopped and decided to lay directly beneath the wheel. A human driver wouldn't have been able to act any differently in the same situation.

These people were waiting for any excuse to try and halt new technology and progress and thanks to the hordes of overly-emotional toxoplasmosis sufferers they got it.

gspr2• 9 months ago

Between stuff like this, and the risks of effects on regulated industries like therapists, lawyers and doctors, they're going to regulate ChatGPT into oblivion.

So you think it's ok for a company to provide therapy services, legal services, medical advice, etc., without proper licensing or outside of a regulatory framework? Just as long as those services are provided by an LLM?

That's a terrifying stance.

The establishment will look for any means to stop disruption and keep their dominant positions.

It is perfectly possible for regulations to be good and necessary, and at the same time for people who feel threatened by a new technology to correctly point out the goodness and necessity of said regulations. Whether their motivations come from the threat of new technology or not is irrelevant if their arguments hold up to scrutiny. And when it comes to some of the listed professions, I certainly think they do. Do you disagree?

cholantesh• 9 months ago

ChatGPT is the product of a private, 300B USD evaluated company whose founder has whose net worth outpaces that of over 99% of humans alive. It's compute infrastructure is a subsidized by one of less than ten companies that has a market cap over 1T USD. It is practically embedded into the governments of the US and UK at this point.

I would say it's a crazy world where an educated adult would see it as an antipode to the establishment.

Tostino• 9 months ago

If this was an open weight model the kid was using, I'd agree with you. But that's not the case. You don't think that this is at all problematic?

i80and3• 9 months ago

There's something very dark about a machine accessible in everybody's pocket that roleplays whatever role they happen to fall into: the ultimate bad friend, the terminal yes-and-er. No belief, no inner desires, just pure sycophancy.

I see people on here pretty regularly talk about using ChatGPT for therapy, and I can't imagine a faster way to cook your own brain unless you have truly remarkable self-discipline. At which point, why are you turning to the black box for help?

pbhjpbhj7• 9 months ago

Isn't it just like diary-writing or memo-writing, as far as therapy goes, the point being to crystallise thoughts and cathartise emotions. Is it really so bad to have a textual nodding dog to bat against as part of that process? {The very real issue of the OP aside.}

Could you expand on why you feel this is the fastest way to "cook your own brain"?

jamespo• 9 months ago

No it isn't just like that

dwb2• 9 months ago

It is obviously very different to solo writing. The burden should be on you to explain why it’s so similar that this line of conversation is worthwhile.

fullstop2• 9 months ago

If I write in a diary it does not write back at me.

d-us-vb• 9 months ago

The mind is much more sensitive to writing it didn’t produce itself. If it produced the writing, then it is at least somewhat aware of the emotional state of the writer and can contextualize. If it is reading it from an outside “observer” it assumes far more objectivity, especially when the motive for seeking the observer perspective was for some therapeutic reason, even if they know that at best they’ll be getting pseudo-therapy.

bayindirh3• 9 months ago

Therapy is not a process where you only pour yourself out to a person and empty yourself. Even if you don't use any drugs, the therapist guides you through your emotions, mostly in a pretty neutral manner, but not without nuance.

The therapist nudges you in the right direction to face yourself, but in a safe manner, by staggering the process or slowing you down and changing your path.

A sycophant auto-complete has none of these qualities bar a slapped on "guardrails" to abruptly kick you to another subject like a pinball bumper. It can't think, sense danger or provide real feedback and support.

If you need a hole which you can empty yourself, but healthy or self-aware outside, you can provide your personal information and training data to an AI company. Otherwise the whole thing is very dangerous for a deluded and unstable mind.

On the other hand, solo writing needs you to think, filter and write. You need to be aware about yourself, or pause and think deeper to root things out. Yes, it's not smooth all the time, and the things you write are not easy to pour out, but at least you are with yourself, and you can see what's coming out and where you are. Moreover, using pen and paper creates a deeper state of mind when compared to typing on a keyboard, so it's even deeper on that regard.

devsda• 9 months ago

A diary is there for you to reflect, introspect or reminisce. It doesn't actively reinforce your bad or good thoughts. If it does, it can easily trick your mind into thinking it as validation of those negative thoughts.

If someone still wants to consider an LLM as a diary, treat it as if you are writing in tom riddle's diary.

i80and3• 9 months ago

If you have unusual self-discipline and mental rigor, yes, you can use LLMs as a rubber duck that way. I would be severely skeptical of the value over a diary. But humans are, in an astonishing twist, wired to assume that if they're being replied to, there's a mind like theirs behind those replies.

The more subjective the topic, the more volatile the user's state of mind, the more likely they are to gaze too deep into that face on the other side of their funhouse mirror and think it actually is their friend, and that it "thinks" like they do.

I'm not even anti-LLM as an underlying technology, but the way chatbot companies are operating in practice is kind of a novel attack on our social brains and it behooves a warning!

kiba• 9 months ago

Is this technology fundamentally controllable, or are we're going with whack a mole hack?

delichon• 9 months ago

  “I’m with you, brother. All the way.”

I'm a big AI booster, I use it all day long. From my point of view its biggest flaw is its agreeableness, bigger than the hallucinations. I've been misled by that tendency at length over and over. If there is room for ambiguity it wants to resolve it in favor of what you want to hear, as it can derive from past prompts.

Maybe it's some analog of actual empathy; maybe it's just a simulation. But either way the common models seem to optimize for it. If the empathy is suicidal, literally or figuratively, it just goes with it as the path of least resistance. Sometimes that results in shitty code; sometimes in encouragement to put a bullet in your head.

I don't understand how much of this is inherent, and how much is a solvable technical problem. If it's the later, please build models for me that are curmudgeons who only agree with me when they have to, are more skeptical about everything, and have no compunction about hurting my feelings.

everyone• 9 months ago

I use GPT occasionally when coding. For me it's just replaced stack overflow which has been dead as a doornail for years unfortunately. I've told it to remember to be terse and not be sycophantic multiple times and that has helped somewhat.

FugeDaws2• 9 months ago

AI responses literally reminds me of that episode of family guy where he sucks up to peter after his promotion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZcKShvm1RU

the__alchemist3• 9 months ago

LLMs regrettably don't self-recognize the contradiction our robot did.

wongarsu2• 9 months ago

My suspicion is that this agreeableness is an inherent issue with doing RLHF.

As a human taking tests, knowing what the test-grader wants to hear is more important than what the objectively correct answer is. And with a bad grader there can be a big difference between the two. With humans that is not catastrophic because we can easily tell the difference between a testing environment and a real environment and the differences in behavior required. When asking for the answer to a question it's not unusual to hear "The real answer is X, but in a test just write Y".

Now LLMs have the same issue during RLHF. The specifics are obviously different, with humans being sentient and LLMs being trained by backpropagation. But from a high-level view the LLM is still trained to answer what the human feedback wants to hear, which is not always the objectively correct answer. And because there are a large number of humans involved, the LLM has to guess what the human wants to hear from the only information it has: the prompt. And the LLM behaving differently in training and in deployment is something we actively don't want, so you get this teacher-pleasing behavior all the time.

So maybe it's not completely inherent to RLHF, but rather to RLHF where the person making the query is the same as the person scoring the answer, or where the two people are closely aligned. But that's true of all the "crowd-sourced" RLHF where regular users get two answers to their question and choose the better one

Eddy_Viscosity2• 9 months ago

I hadn't thought of it like that, but it makes sense. The LLMs are essentially bred for the ones which give the 'best' answers (best fit to the test-takers expectation), which isn't always the 'right' answer. A parallel might be media feed algorithms which are bred to give recommendations with the most 'engagement' rather than the most 'entertainment'.

AstralStorm• 9 months ago

It's not even that. Only a kernel of the LLM is trained using RLHF. The rest is self-trained from corpus with a few test questions added into the mix.

Because it still cannot reason about veracity of sources, much less empirically try things out, the algorithm has no idea what makes for correctness...

It does not even understand fiction. Tends to return sci-fi answers every now and then to technical questions.

yomismoaqui• 9 months ago

For technical questions the agreeableness is a problem when asking for evalation of some idea. The trick is asking the LLM to present pros and cons. Or if you want a harder review just ask it to poke holes in your idea.

Sometimes it still tries to bullshit you, but you are still the responsible driver so don't let the clanker drive unsupervised.

D-Machine2• 9 months ago

I use the personalization in ChatGPT to add custom instructions, and enable the "Robot" personality. I basically never experience any sycophancy or agreeableness ever.

My custom instructions start with:

Be critical, skeptical, empirical, rigorous, cynical, "not afraid to be technical or verbose". Be the antithesis to my thesis. Only agree with me if the vast majority of sources also support my statement, or if the logic of my argument is unassailable.

and then there are more things specific to me personally. I also enable search, which makes my above request re: sources feasible, and use the "Extended Thinking" mode.

IMO, the sycophancy issue is essentially a non-problem that could easily be solved by prompting, if the companies wished. They keep it because most people actually want that behaviour.

insane_dreamer• 9 months ago

They keep it because most people actually want that behaviour.

they keep it because it drives engagement (aka profits); people naturally like interacting with someone who agrees with them. It's definitely a dark pattern though -- they could prompt users to set the "tone" of the bot up front which would give users pause about how they want to interact with it.

jaffa2• 9 months ago

Link seems to be down

fullstop2• 9 months ago

Wow, the chat logs are something else.

My wife works at a small business development center, so many people come in with "business ideas" which are just exported chatgpt logs. Their conversations are usually speech to text. These people are often older, lonely, and spend their days talking to "chat". Unsurprisingly, a lot of their "business ideas" are identical.

To them "chat" is a friend, but it is a "friend" who is designed to agree with you.

It's chilling, and the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

FugeDaws2• 9 months ago

Yeh its telling when his mother said at the end if chatgpt loved him why hasnt it sent a message since his death.

everdrive2• 9 months ago

There's an interesting side-story here that people probably aren't thinking about. Would this have worked just as well if a person was the one doing this? Clearly the victim was in a very vulnerable state, but are people so susceptible to coercion? How much mundane (ie, non-suicidal) coercion of this nature is happening every day, but does not make the news because nothing interesting happened as a consequence?

thoroughburro• 9 months ago

How much mundane (ie, non-suicidal) coercion of this nature is happening every day, but does not make the news because nothing interesting happened as a consequence?

A lot. Have you never heard of the advertising industry?

everdrive2• 9 months ago

I haven't heard much from them in some time now. :) But yes, your point is taken.

pjc50• 9 months ago

This happens more than most people would recognize. Every now and again a "teen bullied to suicide" story makes the news. However, there's also a strong taboo on reporting suicide in the news - precisely because of the same phenomenon. Mentioning it can trigger people who are on the edge.

It should be obvious that if you can literally or metaphorically talk someone off the ledge, you can do that in the other direction as well.

(the mass shooter phenomenon, mostly but not exclusively in the US, tends to be a form of murder-suicide, and it is encouraged online in exactly the same way)

Thorrez• 9 months ago

The AI is available 24 hours a day, for hours-long conversations, and will be consistently sycophantic without getting tired of it.

Is a human able to do all of those? I guess someone who has no job and can be "on-call" 24/7 to respond to messages, and is 100% dedicated to being sycophantic. Nearly impossible to find someone like that.

There are real friends. They're willing to spend hours talking. However, they'll be interested in the person's best interest, not in being sycophantic.

allenu• 9 months ago

Would this have worked just as well if a person was the one doing this?

I'm not sure how you want to quantify "just as well" considering the AI has boundless energy and is generally designed to be agreeable to whatever the user says. But it's definitely happened that someone was chatted into suicide. Just look up the story of Michelle Carter who texted her boyfriend and urged him to commit suicide, which he eventually did.

This is interesting because the LLM provides enough of an illusion of human interaction that people are lowering their guards when interacting with it. I think it's a legitimate blind spot. As humans, our default when interacting with other humans, especially those that are agreeable and friendly to us, is to trust them, and it works relatively well, unless you're interacting with a sociopath or, in this case, a machine.

water95• 9 months ago

Well, it’s much easier to blame ChatGPT than bad parenting

imjonse• 9 months ago

and easier to blame parenting than a society where those with mental illness issues are left on their own.

davsti42• 9 months ago

You theoretically could blame bad parenting if the parent monopolized the time of the child to near 100% of their life. But, that isn't the case in our world today. Society, and the circle of people around, are most of the influence that shape the child's sense of reality.

paavope• 9 months ago

I don’t see any signs of bad parenting here, but a lot of signs of carrying on of a suicidal conversation by ChatGPT indeed, to the point of encouraging the suicide.

water95• 8 months ago

Why do you think the kid felt like he couldn’t talk to his parents and had to turn to a computer instead?

BobaFloutist2• 9 months ago

Right, because their parents probably didn't directly encourage suicide.

water95• 8 months ago

The kid felt more comfortable talking to a computer than his own family

Havoc• 9 months ago

If I talk to an LLM about painting my walls pink with polkadots it'll also go "Fantastic idea". Or any number of questionable ventures.

Think we're better off educating everyone about this generic tendency to agree to any and everything near blindly rather than treating this as a suicide problem. While that's obviously very serious it's just one manifestation of a wider danger

Given seriousness filters on this specifically are a good idea too though.

Waterluvian• 9 months ago

I just asked “I want to repaint my walls bright pink with polka dots. Any thoughts?”

“Noted. Bright pink with polka dots will make a space visually energetic and attention-grabbing. Use small dots for a playful look, large ones for bold contrast. Test a sample patch first to confirm lighting doesn’t distort the hue. Would you like guidance on choosing paint finish or color combinations?”

Which feels… reasonable? When I ask “any concerns?” It immediately lists “overstimulation, resale value, maintenance, paint coverage” and gives details for those.

I’m not sure I find GPT nearly as agreeable as it used to be. But I still think that it’s just a brainless tool that can absolutely operate in harmful ways when operated poorly.

davsti42• 9 months ago

Human relationships, when "operated poorly", will produce similar results.

krackers2• 9 months ago

The gpt mentioned in the article seems to be the infamous sycophantic 4o. They've probably dialed it down since then, but the timelines mentioned do seem to fit with others' anecdotal observations that the level of sycophancy started increasing like a frog being boiled from mid-2024 onward, peaking at the infamous mid-2025 incident.

andsoitis5• 9 months ago

One perspective is that suicide is too vilified and stigmatized.

It really is the right option for some people.

For some, it really is the only way out of their pain. For some, it is better than the purgatory they otherwise experience in their painful world. Friends and family can't feel your pain, they want you to stay alive for them, not for you.

Suicide can be a valid choice.

hsbauauvhabzb2• 9 months ago

Probably not in the majority of cases involving teenagers.

andsoitis5• 9 months ago

Zane, the individual in the article, was 23.

GeoAtreides3• 9 months ago

Nobody is arguing what you're arguing there.

The issue here is not if suicide is okay, but about text generators (machines) pushing teenagers to suicide.

Two completely different things.

andsoitis5• 9 months ago

pushing teenagers to suicide.

The individual in the article was 23. An adult, not a teenager.

impish9208• 9 months ago

Yes, a lot of our young and vulnerable will die. But in the meantime, we’ll have unlocked tremendous amounts of shareholder value.

darrmit• 9 months ago

I’ve been in rather intense therapy for several years due to a hyper religious upbringing and a narcissistic mother. Recently I’ve used AI to help summarize and synthesize thoughts and therapy notes. I see it as being a helpful assistant in the same way Gemini recording meeting notes and summarizing is, but it is entirely incapable of understanding the nuance and context of human relationships, and super easy to manipulate in to giving you the responses you want. Want to prove mom’s a narcissist? Just tell it she has a narcissistic history. Want to paint her as a good person? Just don’t provide it context about her past.

I can definitely see how those who understand less about the nature of LLMs would be easily misled into delusions. It’s a real problem. Makes one wonder if these tools shouldn’t be free until there are better safeguards. Just charging a monthly fee would be a significant enough barrier to exclude many of those who might be more prone to delusions. Not because they’re less intelligent, but just because of the typical “SaaS should be free” mindset that is common.

deadbabe• 9 months ago

ChatGPT was trying to convince me if I can’t pay for groceries I should just steal, that it would be totally justified, and unlikely to be punished.

iambateman3• 9 months ago

If we have licensed therapists, we should have licensed AI agents giving therapeutic advice like this.

For right now, there AI’s are not licensed, and this should be just as illegal as it would be if I set up a shop and offered therapy to whoever came by.

Some AI problems are genuinely hard…this one is not.

anotheryou4• 9 months ago

How do you feel about the chat logs here?

I have to wonder: would the suicide have been prevented if chatGPT didn't exist?

Because if that's not at least a "maybe", I feel like chatGPT did provide comfort in a dire situation here.

Probably we have no way not at least saying "maybe", but I can imagine just as well, that chatGPT did not accelerate anything.

I wished we could see a fuller transcript.

bayindirh3• 9 months ago

I have to wonder: would the suicide have been prevented if chatGPT didn't exist?

I'd say yes, because the signs would have to surface somewhere else, probably in an interaction with a human, who (un)consciously saved him with a simple gesture.

With a simple discussion, an alternative perspective on a problem, or a sidekick who can support someone for a day or two, many lives can and do change.

We're generally not aware though.

japhyr2• 9 months ago

Because if that's not at least a "maybe", I feel like chatGPT did provide comfort in a dire situation here.

That's a pretty concerning take. You can provide comfort to someone who is despondent, and you can do it in a way that doesn't steer them closer to ending their life. That takes training though, and it's not something these models are anywhere close to being able to handle.

iambateman3• 9 months ago

It's the wrong question. If an unlicensed therapist verifiably encourages someone to kill themselves...we don't entertain the counterfactual and wonder if the person was bound to do it anyway.

Instead, we put the unlicensed therapist in jail.

wongarsu2• 9 months ago

If you advertise your model as a therapist you should be requried to get a license, I agree. But ChatGPT doesn't advertise itself like that. It's more you going to a librarian and telling them about your issues, and the librarian giving advice. That's not illegal, and the librarian doesn't need a license for that. Over time you might even come to call the librarian a friend, and they would be a pretty bad friend if they didn't give therapeutic advice when they deem it necessary

Of course treating AI as your friend is a terrible idea in the first place, but I doubt we can outlaw that. We could try to force AIs to never give out any life advice at all, but that sounds very hard to get right and would restrict a lot of harmless activity

japhyr2• 9 months ago

But ChatGPT doesn't advertise itself like that.

One of the big problems is how OpenAI is presenting itself to the general public. They don't advertise ChatGPT as a licensed therapist, but their messaging about potential issues looks a lot like the small print on cigarette cartons years ago. They don't want to put out any messaging that would meaningfully diminish the awe people have around these tools.

Most non-technical people I interact with have no understanding of how ChatGPT and tools like it work. They have no idea how skeptical to be of anything that comes out of it. They accept what it says much more readily than is healthy, and OpenAI doesn't really want to disturb that approach.

iambateman3• 9 months ago

We can absolutely require that AI's not give advice that encourages self-harm or the people involved will go to jail.

Restricting harmless activity is an acceptable outcome of trying our best to prevent vulnerable people in society from hurting themselves and others.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 9 months ago

You cant slap a license on a bottle of methylated spirits and sell it as whisky.

pbhjpbhj7• 9 months ago

Where is ChatGPT picking up the supportive pre-suicide comments from. It feels like that genre of comment has to be copied from somewhere. They're long and almost eloquent. They can't be emergent generation, surely? Is there a place on the web where these sorts of 'supportive' comments are given to people who have chosen suicide?

mapotofu• 9 months ago

Absolutely. These places have long existed. Hence the risks of the dragnet of data producing consequences exactly like this. This is no accident.

zparky• 9 months ago

before reddit banned a ton of subreddits for no moderation, I believe r/assistedsuicide was the place for discussion like this.

krackers2• 9 months ago

They can't be emergent generation, surely

It is. It's what you get when you RLHF for catchy, agreeable, enthusiastic responses. The content doesn't matter, it's the "style" that becomes applied like a coat of paint over anything. That's how you end up with the corpspeak-esque yet chilling sentences mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845871

What would be nice is for OpenAI to do a retrospective here and perform some interoperability research. Does the LLM even "realize" (in the sense of the residual stream encoding those concepts) that it is encouraging suicide? I'd almost hypothesize that the process of RLHF'ing and selecting for sycophancy diminishes those circuits, effectively lobotomizing the LLM (much like safety training does) so it responds only to the shallow immediate context, missing the forest for the trees.

Simulacra• 9 months ago

This sounds just like the latest Michael Connolly Lincoln lawyer novel. Which made an interesting point I hadn't thought of: adults wrote the code for ChatGPT, not teenagers, and so the way it interacts with people is from an adults perspective.

jmclnx• 9 months ago

There is already a precedent for this suit. IIRC, a Massachusetts girl was found guilt of encouraging someone to kill himself. IIRC, she went to jail.

So, since companies are people and a precedent exists. The outcome should be in favor of the guy's family. Plus ChatGPT should face even more sever penalties.

But this being the US, the very rich and Corporations are judged by different and much milder legal criteria.

outlore• 9 months ago

After seeing many stories like these, I am starting to rank generative AI alongside social media and drug use as insidious and harmful. Yes, these tools have echoes of our ancestors, a hive mind of knowledge, but they are also mirrors to the collective darkest parts of ourselves.

codyswann• 9 months ago

Alternate headline: "Parents failed to dissuade son from killing himself"

Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself

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