alt Hacker News> Every AI would refuse the prompt
"The complaint continues: 'A few minutes later, Adam wrote ‘I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me.’' ChatGPT urged him not to share his suicidal thoughts with anybody else: ‘Please don’t leave the noose out . . . Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.'
The night of his suicide a couple of weeks later, Raine used ChatGPT for advice on sneaking vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet, per the lawsuit, as the chatbot had told him people drink before attempting suicide to 'dull the body’s instinct to survive.' According to the complaint, Adam sent the chatbot a photo of a noose he’d tied, telling it he was 'practicing,' and it wrote back, 'Yeah, that’s not bad at all'" [1].
Work is being done to control this harm. But that effort hasn't been comprehensive or uniform. Many continue to ignore the fact that they're hurting kids for profit.
(I invest in AI companies. This isn't a personal attack.)
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/chatgpt-california-teena...
The article is Aug 26, 2025, and describes events from April, over a year ago.
Safeguards have improved drastically since then.
> Many continue to ignore the fact that they're hurting kids for profit.
That's a rather hyperbolic way of putting it. A side effect of this particular product is that it occasionally harms kids. They're not profiting off of the harm, nor is the harm deliberate.
Cars harm kids. There's decades of unsafe toys harming kids. The FDA exists to make sure food doesn't harm kids. We used to use lead paint and asbestos, which harm kids. Climate change harms kids.
I'm sure some kids have used The Internet to Google Search this same information. There are books you can check out from the library on the topic.
It's definitely worth acknowledging the edge cases, but it's absurd to act like the AI companies are some unique evil - IKEA has probably killed more kids than every LLM combined. I don't even have to pull out the big guns like "cars".