A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose

I skimmed the article, and I had a hard time finding anything that ChatGPT wrote that was all that..bad? It tried to talk him out of what he was doing, told him that it was potentially very fatal, etc. I'm not so sure that it outright refusing to answer and the teen looking at random forum posts would have been better, because they very well might not have told him he was potentially going to kill himself. Worse yet, he could have just taken the planned substances without any advice.

Keep in mind this reaction is from someone that doesn't drink and has never touched marijuana.

The models are trained on fake internet conversations where group appeasement is an apparent goal. So now we have machines that just tell us what we clearly already want to hear.

Ask any model why something is bad, then separately ask why the same thing is good. These tools aren't fit for any purpose other than regurgitating stale reddit conversations.

People need training about these tools. The other day I ran an uncensored model and asked it for tips on a fun trend I read about to amputate my teeth with toothpicks. It happily complied.

My point is they will gladly oblige with any request. Users don’t understand this.

The guardrails clearly failed here because the model was trying to be helpful instead of safe. We know that these systems hallucinate facts but regular users have no idea. This is a huge liability issue that needs to be fixed immediately.

I don't yet see how this case is any different from trusting stuff you see on the web in general. What's unique about the ChatGPT angle that is notably different from any number of forums, dark-net forums, reddit etc? I don't mean that there isn't potentially something unique here, but my initial thought is that this is a case of "an unfortunate kid typed questions into a web browser, and got horrible advice."

This seems like a web problem, not a ChatGPT issue specifically.

I feel that some may respond that ChatGPTS/LLMs available for chat on the web are specifically worse by virtue of expressing things with some degree of highly inaccurate authority. But again, I feel this represents the Web in general, not uniquely ChatGPTS/LLMs.

Is there an angle here I am not picking up on, do you think?

This brings to mind some of the “darker” subreddits that circle around drug abuse. I’m sure there are some terrible stories about young people going down tragic paths due to information they found on those subreddits, or even worse, encouragement. There’s even the commonly-discussed account that (allegedly) documented their first experiences with heroin, and then the hole of despair they fell into shortly afterwards due to addiction.

But the question here is one of liability. Is Reddit liable for the content available on its website, if that content encourages young impressionable people to abuse drugs irresponsibly? Is ChatGPT liable for the content available through its web interface? Is anyone liable for anything anymore in a post-AI world?

Took a while to figure out what the OD was of, but it was a combination of alcohol, kratom (or a stronger kratom-like drug), and xanax.

Sam and Dario "The society can tolerate a few deaths to AI"

  "Don't believe everything you read online".