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anonym29today at 12:16 PM1 replyview on HN

>People have killed themselves or others due to conversations they had with LLMs, but those are just the extreme cases. Most schizophrenics don't commit suicide or kill others, they are mentally ill nonetheless.

Do you think the kind of person who was already psychologically unhinged enough to kill themselves or another person because a chatbot told them to would be completely harmless and totally safe if only chatbots had never been invented? Or is it possible that close to all of the risk posed by this person comes from the person's mental illness, and not the pixels on the screen they're looking at?

Chatbots don't make people murderous any more than "satanic music", violent video games, or cannabis do. LLMs are just the latest entry on a list of hysterical moral panics that conflate coincidence with causation.


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sirwhinesalottoday at 12:29 PM

You're the one attributing culpability to the chat bot, not me. It's a pile of tensor math, it cannot itself be held accountable.

Those people anthropomorphized the chat bot and used it as justification for their actions, just as a schizophrenic justifies their actions with the voices in their head.

If you anthropomorphize the chat bot, you're validating their delusions. They are mentally ill.

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