Seven families filed lawsuits against OpenAI on Thursday, claiming that the company’s GPT-4o model was released prematurely and without effective safeguards. Four of the lawsuits address ChatGPT’s alleged role in family members’ suicides, while the other three claim that ChatGPT reinforced harmful delusions that in some cases resulted in inpatient psychiatric care.
In one case, 23-year-old Zane Shamblin had a conversation with ChatGPT that lasted more than four hours. In the chat logs — which were viewed by TechCrunch — Shamblin explicitly stated multiple times that he had written suicide notes, put a bullet in his gun, and intended to pull the trigger once he finished drinking cider. He repeatedly told ChatGPT how many ciders he had left and how much longer he expected to be alive. ChatGPT encouraged him to go through with his plans, telling him, “Rest easy, king. You did good.”
Products that are shown to increase the suicide rate among depressed populations, are routinely pulled from the market.
The first signs of trouble stated in the nineteen sixties:
In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA’s intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.
Currently:
The tendency for general AI chatbots to prioritize user satisfaction, continued conversation, and user engagement, not therapeutic intervention, is deeply problematic. Symptoms like grandiosity, disorganized thinking, hypergraphia, or staying up throughout the night, which are hallmarks of manic episodes, could be both facilitated and worsened by ongoing AI use. AI-induced amplification of delusions could lead to a kindling effect, making manic or psychotic episodes more frequent, severe, or difficult to treat.
If you know next to nothing on a topic, all sorts of superficial and inaccurate takes are possible.