I bet there are people who committed suicide after their Tamagotchi died. Jumping into the ‘AI bad’ narrative because of individual incidents like this is moronic. If you give a pillow to a million people, a few are going to suffocate on it. This is what happens when you scale something up enough, and it proves absolutely nothing.
The same logic applies to self-driving vehicles. We’ll likely never reach a point where accidents stop happening entirely. Even if we replaced every human-driven vehicle with a self-driving one that’s 10 times safer than a human, we’d still see 8 people dying because of them every day in the US alone. Imagine posting articles about those incidents and complaining they’re not 100% safe. What’s the alternative? Going back to human drivers and 80 deaths a day?
Yes, we should strive to improve. Yes, we should try to fix the issues that can be fixed. No, I’m not saying ‘who cares’ - and so on with the strawmans I’m going to receive for this. All I’m saying is that we should be reasonable and use some damn common sense when reacting to these outrage-inducing, fear-mongering articles that are only after your attention and clicks.
A chatbot acts like a human, it’s also very supportive, polite, and courteous. It doesn’t get angry or judge you. This can affect one’s mind in a way that other things you’ve mentioned like a Tamagotchi, a pillow, or a self-driving car can’t. We simply can’t compare AI to these things. Adults fall for this, let alone teenagers who are fueled by extreme levels of hormones.
All I’m saying is that we should be reasonable and use some damn common sense when reacting to these outrage-inducing, fear-mongering articles that are only after your attention and clicks.
Based and true.
A Florida mom
It’s always Florida.
We are playing with some dark and powerful shit here.
We are social creatures. We’re primed to care about our social identity more than our own lives.
As the sociologist Brooke Harrington puts it, if there was an E = mc2 of social science, it would be SD > PD, “social death is more frightening than physical death.”
…yet we’re making technologies that tap into that sensitive mental circuitry.
And the cruel irony on top of it is:
Because we care so much about preserving our social status, we have a tendency to deny or downplay how vulnerable we all are to this kind of “obvious” manipulation.
Just think of how many people say “ads don’t affect me”.
<If I can find it, I’ll add a link to an interesting study on distracted driving and hands-free options. If I recall correctly, talking to someone in the passenger seat was only mildly distracting, but having the same conversation over a hands-free call was way more distracting. And their proposed explanation was that a passenger has the same context and naturally understands if the conversation needs to pause, but on a call there is no shared context so there is social pressure to keep going. Unnervingly, voice assistant interactions had the same problem. They trip the same part of our brain that worries about politeness at the expense of our physical safety.>
I’m worried we’re going to severely underestimate the extent to which this stuff warps our brains.
I was going to make a joke about how my social status died over a decade ago, but then I realized that no, it didn’t. It changed.
Instead of my social status being something amongst friends and classmates, it’s now coworkers, managers, and clients. A death in the social part of my world - work - would be so devastating that it motivates me to suffer just a little bit more. Losing my job would end a lot of things for me.
I need to reevaluate my life
What we need is a human society predicated on affording human decency, rather than on taking it away to make profit for those who already have the most.
Maybe a bit more parenting could have helped. And not having a fricking gun in your house your kid can reach.
On and regulations on LLMs please.
The fact that stupid low effort comments like this are upvoted indicates that Lemmy is exactly the same as Reddit.
Platforms change, people don’t. Shocking, no?
Maybe a bit more parenting could have helped.
Yes, maybe that would have made you a better person.
He ostensibly killed himself to be with Daenerys Targaryen in death. This is sad on so many levels, but yeah… parenting. Character .AI may have only gone 17+ in July, but Game of Thrones was always TV-MA.
Issue I see with character.ai is that it seem to be unmoderated. Everyone with a paid subscription can submit their trained character. Why the Frick do sexual undertones or overtones come even up in non-age restricted models?
They, the provider of that site, deserve the full front of this lawsuit.
Maybe a bit more parenting could have helped.
No.
If someone is depressed enough to kill themselves, no amount of “more parenting” could’ve stopped that.
Shame on you for trying to shame the parents.
And not having a fricking gun in your house your kid can reach.
Maybe. Maybe not. I won’t argue about the merits of securing weapons in a house with kids. That’s a no-brainer. But there is always more than one way to skin the proverbial cat.
On and regulations on LLMs please.
Pandora’s Box has been opened. There’s no putting it back now. No amount of regulation will fix any of this.
Maybe a Time Machine.
Maybe…
I do believe that we need to talk more about suicide, normalize therapy, free healthcare (I’ll settle for free mental healthcare), funding for more licensed social workers in schools, train parents and teachers on how to recognize these types of situations, etc.
As parents we do need to be talking more with our kids. Even just casual check ins to see how they’re doing. Parents should also talk to their kids about how they are feeling too. It’ll help the kids understand that everybody feels stress, anxiety, and sadness (to name a few emotions).
Yes parenting could have helped to distinguish between talking to a real person and a unmoving cold machine.
And sure regulations now would not change what happend, duh. And regulations need to happen, companies like OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta are running amok, their LLMS as unrestricted they are now are doing way too much damage to society as they are helping.
This needs to stop!
Also I feel no shame, shaming parents who don’t, or rather inadequate, do their one job. This was a presentable death.
Yes parenting could have helped to distinguish between talking to a real person and a unmoving cold machine.
Hi, I’m a psychologist. I am not aware of peer-researched papers which reach the conclusion that, for all disorders that involve an unsatisfactory appraisal of reality, parenting is a completely effective solution. Please find sources.
This falls into the field of Media Literacy.
No thanks, i just want to make out with my Marilyn Monrobot
This timeline is pure, distilled madness
He’s from Florida. I think that’s where the time rift is
Having spent more than enough time down there, I’d have to agree.
Sewell Setzer III – remember his name. Killed by AI.
I thought he killed himself. Ah well, maybe I didn’t read the article carefully enough.
