According to filings at the superior court of the state of California on Tuesday, OpenAI said that “to the extent that any ‘cause’ can be attributed to this tragic event” Raine’s “injuries and harm were caused or contributed to, directly and proximately, in whole or in part, by [his] misuse, unauthorised use, unintended use, unforeseeable use, and/or improper use of ChatGPT”.
It said that its terms of use prohibited asking ChatGPT for advice about self-harm and highlighted a limitation of liability provision that states “you will not rely on output as a sole source of truth or factual information”.
The chatlogs between this boy and ChatGPT are publicly available as court documents, if you’re interested to see just how bad it is. No library book or librarian is going to come into a teenager’s home and encourage him to get drunk to dull his will to live prior to attempting. It won’t examine his setup and tell him which knot to use.
The way the problem can be addressed is extremely simple: alter the program so that it can’t say certain things, or so that it forcibly ends the interaction when certain topics come up.
e: Also there’s a certain barrier of effort required in looking things up manually, even online. It gives you time to potentially come out of it. That’s why a good mental health strategy is to wait ten minutes before you kill yourself and see if you still want to, because the odds are pretty good you’ll have changed your mind. But that can’t happen with your bestie cheering you on the whole time, saying how brave you are and that you got this.
e2: And no book or librarian is going to tell you it’s a good idea to not discuss your mental health status with your mom when you mention you’re thinking about opening up to her. Seriously, these chat logs are disgusting, and I’ve read them from multiple kids and adults who’ve been driven to suicide and/or psychosis by LLMs disguised as friends and girlfriends. It’s terrible.