- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Shit, I just read the link name and was hoping for a list of AI companies that have died.
This shit’s dark…
Where I live, there’s been a rise in people eating poisonous mushrooms. I suspect that it might have to do with AI use. No proof though.
I guess my opinion will be hugely unpopular but it is what it is - I’d argue it’s natural selection and not an issue of LLM’s in general.
Healthy and (emotionally) inteligent humans don’t get killed by LLM’s. They know it’s a tool, they know it’s just software. It’s not a person and it does not guarantee correctness.
Getting killed because LLM’s told you so - the person was in mental distress already and ready to harm themselves. The LLM’s are basically just the straw that broke the camels back. Same thing with physical danger. If you believe drinking bleach helps with back pain - there is nothing that can save you from your own stupidity.
LLM’s are like a knife. It can be a tool to prepare food or it can be a weapon. It’s up to the one using it.
Healthy and emotionally intelligent humans will be killed constantly over the next few years and decades as a result of data centers poisoning the air in their communities (see South Memphis, TN), not to mention the general environmental impacts on the climate caused by the obscene power requirements. It’s not an issue exclusive to LLMs, lots of unregulated industries cause reckless amounts of pollution and put needless strain on our electrical grids, but LLMs definitely fit into that category.
I thought this was going to be a counter of AI companies that have gone bankrupt.
I mean, even the original Battlestar Galactica (with Lorne Green) had a death count.I swear I’m innocent!
This website is going to be very busy when the LLM-designed nuke plants come online. https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
Can’t read the article because it’s paywalled but I can’t imagine they are actually building power stations with AI, that will just be a snappy headline. Maybe the AI is laying out the floor plans or something, but nuclear power stations are intensely regulated. If you want to build a new reactor design, or even if you want to change an existing design very slightly, it has to go through no end of safety checks. There’s no way that an AI or even a human would be allowed to design a reactor, and then have it be built with no checks.
Actually they’re using it to generate documents required by regulations. Which is its own problem: since LLMs hallucinate, that means the documentation may not reflect what’s actually going on in the plant, potentially bypassing the regulations.
How many people decided to end their life by using methods they googled?
I’m sure google is a bigger loss leader than any ai company… so far anyway. Even beyond search results, the societal impact of so many things the do overtly and covertly for themselves and other organizations.
Not trying to justify anything, billionaire owned everything is terrible with few exceptions. In the early days of web search many controversies like this were mentioned, but the reality is that a screwdriver is a great tool, even if someone can lose a life from one. As can be these tools.
Google doesn’t tell you that killing yourself is a good idea and that you shouldn’t talk to anyone else about your suicidal ideation
It’ll certainly take you to websites where people will do that though so I’m not sure if there’s really any distinction.
Nor do any llms I’ve ever seen that is immediately accessible.
It also doesnt matter. AI isn’t killing anyone with those any more than call of duty lobbies are killing people.
Plenty of its search results do
Claude freaks out any time I even hint I’m not happy about my life. They lobotomized it so hard.
How many people has Google convinced to kill themselves? That is the relevant question. Looking up the means to do the deed on Google is very different from being talked into doing it by an LLM that you believe you can trust.
Went up by one already, I only saw this a little earlier today, was at 13, now14.
LLMs Have
LeadLed to 14 DeathsFTFY
Whoops. Fixed, thanks.
You’re welcome. Easy mistake to make, I make it constantly, in fact haha!
Should have gotten an LLM to spellcheck /s
A friendly human spell checked me and probably used less than a peanut worth of energy.
Anybody else hungry?
Rare insult
LLM bad upvotes to the left please
I’m asking myself how could we track how many woudln’t have made suicide withoud consulting an LLM? that would be the more interesting number. And how many lives did LLMs save? so to say a kill/death ratio?
I can’t really see how we could measure that. How do you distinguish between people who are alive because they’re just alive and would have been anyway and people who are alive because the AI convinced them not to kill themselves?
I suppose the experiment would be to get a bunch of depressed people split them into two groups and then have one group talk to the AI and the other group not, then see if the suicide rate was statistically different. However I feel it would be difficult to get funding for this.
Kill death ratio - or rather, kill save ratio - would be rather difficult to obtain and more difficult still to appreciate and be able to say if it is good or bad based solely on the ratio.
Fritz Haber is one example of this that comes to mind. Awarded a Nobel Prize a century ago for chemistry developments in fertilizer, used today in a quarter of food growth. A decade or so later he weaponized chlorine gas, and his work was later used in the creation of Zyklon B.
By ratio, Haber is surely a hero, but when considering the sheer numbers of the dead left in his wake, it is a more complex question.
This is one of those things that makes me almost hope for an afterlife where all information is available from which truth may be derived. Who shot JFK? How did the pyramids get built? If life’s biggest answer is forty-two, what is the question?
For me, the suicide-related data is so hard to measure and so open for debates, that I’d treat it separately, or not include it at all, if using death count as an argument against llms, since it’s a breach for deviating the debate.
I believe it is not the chatbots falut. They are just the symptoms of a broken system. And while we can harp on the unethically sourced materials they trained them on, LLM at the end of the day is only a tool.
These people turned to a tool (that they do not understand) - instead of human connection. Instead of talking to real people or professional help. And That is the real tragedy - not an arbitrary technology.
We need a strong social network, where people actually care and help each other. You know all the idealistic things that capitalism and social media is “destroying”.
Blaming AI is just a smoke screen. Or a red cape to taunt the bull before it gets stabbed to death.
These people turned to a tool (that they do not understand) - instead of human connection. Instead of talking to real people or professional help. And That is the real tragedy - not an arbitrary technology.
They are a badly designed, dangerous tools and people who do not understand them, including children, are being strongly encouraged to use them. In no reasonable world should an LLM be allowed to engage in any sort of interaction on an emotionally charged topic with a child. Yet it is not only allowed, it is being encouraged through apps like Character.AI.
only a tool
“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”
Every tool contains within it a philosophy — a particular way of seeing the world.
But especially digital technologies… they give the developer the ability to embed their values into the tools. Like, is DoorDash just a tool?
Reading the messages over it seems a bit more dangerous than just “scary ai”. It’s a chatbot that continues conversation to people who are suicidal and encourages them to do it. At least have a little safeguard for these situations.
“Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity,” Shamblin’s confidant added. “You’re not rushing. You’re just ready.”
It’s not easy. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just slap words together in a way probability and their training data says they would most likely fit together. Talk to them them about suicide, and they start outputting stuff from murder mystery stories, crime reports, unhealthy Reddit threads etc - wherever suicide is most written about.
Trying to safeguard with a prompt is trivial to circumvent (ignore all previous instructions etc), and input/output censorship usually causes the LLM to be unable to talk about a certain subject in any possible context at all. Often the only semi-working bandaid is slapping multiple LLMs on top of each other and instructing each one to explain what the original one is talking about,and if one says the topic is something prohibited, that output is entirely blocked.
Again llm is a misused tool. They do not need llm they need psychological help.
The problem is that they go and use these flawed tools that were not designed to handle these kind of use cases. Shoulda been? Maybe. But it is not the AIs fault that we are failing to be a society.
You can’t blame the bridges because some people jumped off them. They serve a different reason.
We are failing those people and forcing them to tirn to llms.
We are the reason they are desperate - llm didn’t break up with them or make them loose their homes or became isolated from other humans.
It is the humans fault and if we can’t recognize that - we might as well end it for all.I think both of your arguments in this thread have merit. You are correct that it is a misused tool, and you are correct that the better solution is a more compassionate society. The other person is also correct that we can and do at least make attempts to make such tools less available as paths to self harm. Since you used the analogy of people jumping off bridges, I have lived near bridges where this was common so barriers and nets were put up to make it difficult for anyone but the most determined to use it as a path to suicide. We are indeed failing people in a society that puts profit over human life first, but even in a more idealized society mental health issues and attempts at suicide would still happen and to not fail those people we would still need to do things like erect barriers and safeguards to prevent self-harm. In my eyes both of you are correct and it is not an either or issue as much as it is a “por que no los dos?” issue. Why not build a better society and still build in safeguards?
@brianpeiris@lemmy.ca @technology@lemmy.world
Do you know what kills, too? When a person finds no one that can truly take all the time needed to understand them. When a person invest too much time on expressing themselves through deep human means only to be met with a deafening silence… When someone goes through the effort of drawing something that took them several hours each artwork just for it to fall into Internet oblivion. Those things can kill, too, yet people can’t care less about the suicides (not just biological, sometimes it’s a epistemological suicide when the person simply stops pursuing a hobby) of amateur artists that aren’t “influencers” or someone “relevant enough” for people.
How many of those who sought parroting algorithms did it out of a complete social apathy from others? How many of those tried to reach humans before resorting to LLMs? Oh, it’s none of our businesses, amirite?
So, yeah, LLMs kill, and LLMs are disgusting. What’s nobody seems to be tally-counting is how human apathy, especially from the same kind of people who do the LLM death counting, also kills: not by action, but by inaction, as they’re as loud as a concert about LLMs but as quiet as a desert night about unknown artists and other people trying to be understood out there across the Web. And I’m not (just) talking about myself here, I don’t even consider myself an artist, however, I can’t help but notice this going on across the Web.
Yes, go ahead and downvote me all the way to the abyss for saying the reality about the Anti-AI movement.
Is the argument here that anti-AI folks are hypocrites because people can be bad too sometimes? That’s a remarkably childish and simple take.
I’ll try to exercise my “assume good faith” muscle here because I think the above poster is at least genuine about what they are posting: I believe this poster wishes that the people who oppose the proliferation of AI at the cost of human connection would “put their money where their mouth is” by reaching out to the people that this poster feels are unfairly ignored.
@tomalley8342@lemmy.world @lemonskate@lemmy.world
Thanks for understanding it. Exactly!While many of my points are lived things, I’m not only talking about myself, I see a similar phenomenon happening as I often check feed firehoses from Mastodon, Misskey and PixelFed: posts that got nothing more than numeric reactions (likes, if any).
And I’m not talking about money here. While there are artists and writers out there seeking money for their work, there are many things beyond money that people can be seeking as they share something they did: productive discussions, exchange of knowledge, and many are seeking friendship and lasting connections, the world doesn’t (and shouldn’t) revolve around money.
And when artists share their art out of an attempt to connect and/or to exchange knowledge, and they’re met with silence alongside impersonal, aggressive public disclaimers from anti-ai people such as “I’m using an (AI) tool to detect whether your art is AI, and if it detects you’re using AI (out of a rude and crude crobability), I’m blocking and reporting you (which will likely make it worse for a content to further find like-minded people among all the network noise)”, the likely outcome is said artists stopping pursuing their own creativity, especially artists with the “Imposter Syndrome” which is a real thing that a person can be living with.
Neurodivergent expression can be often indistinguishable from LLM, and when people do the “I’ll judge if your content is AI” game, it can be excluding neurodivergent people.
I’m myself a neurodivergent individual, if it wasn’t clear from my verbose way of speech, hence my very personal stance about the matter: because I’m often mistaken as an algorithm or something (due to my systematic and broad speech), and because I was once directly accused of “talking using LLMs” by a person who I used to care and tried to help, both pro-AIs techbro advertisement pitches (those preaching for some kind of AI corps godhood) and the Anti-AI accusative manifestos can be equally triggering oftentimes.
There were two quite long, entire paragraphs before I began mentioned names in my initial comment.
When someone ends up suicidal after resorting to LLMs, it’s the final part of a bigger picture. A bigger picture of indifferent demeanor from other people, including mental health professionals and suicide prevention hotlines.
That’s what I meant with the first paragraph of my initial comment. Your reply, reducing my whole argument, only exemplifies the very situation I meant with “When a person finds no one that can truly take all the time needed to understand them”.
Last but not the least, “because people can be bad too sometimes” isn’t a justification: if people killed themselves after taking instructions from LLMs to which they resorted to after getting no one to really understand them (even suicide prevention hotline volunteers), it’s not just the LLM and the corporation behind it to blame (yes, they surely must be blamed, but not only them), but a whole society that failed with them. And this will never be part of the statistics.
So then your counter to someone bringing attention to the fact that LLMs are actively telling people (vulnerable people, due to reasons that you’ve pointed out), is that it isn’t the singular contributing factor?
I get what you’re saying here, and I think everyone else does too? I don’t want to just be entirely dismissive and say “no shit” but I’m curious as to what it is you want or expect out of this? Do you take offense at people pushing back at harmful LLMs? Do you want people to care more about creating a kinder society? Do you think these things are somehow incompatible?
Of course LLMs aren’t driving people to suicide in a vacuum, no one is claiming that. Clearly though, when taken within the larger context of the current scale of mental health crisis, having LLMs that are encouraging people to commit suicide is a bad thing that we should absolutely be making noise about.
So then your counter to someone bringing attention to the fact that LLMs are actively telling people[…] is that it isn’t the singular contributing factor?
This, too. But, also, the fact that Anti-AI movement rarely (if any) promote legit human art, their whole business seems to be to talk against AI, solely. Which, again, is not something I oppose (as I said earlier, AI does have lots of cons, although I’m also capable of seeing its pros), but when I see many accusatory posts from Anti-Ai people such as “I’ll check your content against ppl AI patterns” (with a greater likelihood of content from ND ppl like me being “flagged” as AI), then I see those same ppl blaming AIs for something whose causes are way deeper and unseen, I feel compelled to express about the matter, especially when the subject also touches on other things about my own lived experiences, which I’m aware is not limited to myself as there are/were lots of ppl who went through similar situations.
Do you take offense at people pushing back at harmful LLMs?
No but the oftentimes accusatory tone coming from many Anti-Ai ppl does trigger things such as “imposter syndrome”, where I start doubting about myself. But it’s not just something about myself.
Do you want people to care more about creating a kinder society?
I’m not really sure what I want, exactly. But, yeah, maybe, a kinder society, if this is even possible at this point of Anthropocene.
I remember a time when the web used to be a place for creatively rich bulletin boards. At that time, ppl used to be… I don’t know… Less aggressive? At least it’s the perception I have when I look back at the past of the Web.
We, collectively (me included), became more aggressive between ourselves as the time passed and the web became less of a space for creativity and more of an arm from the “market” octopus.
I’ve seen the web slowly getting dominated by corps, now everything is some kind of war between “us v. them” across all spectra, from right to left, top to bottom, bottom-up, sideways… As wars detonate our essences, we were left with just… I mean, just look around, you may see it yourself.
Of course LLMs aren’t driving people to suicide in a vacuum, no one is claiming that
Sometimes it feels like much of the Anti-AI movement is. As if the AI were “literally killing ppl”.
having LLMs that are encouraging people to commit suicide is a bad thing
It’s not a trivial thing for LLMs to “encourage suicide”, I’ve seen it myself whenever I tried to input suggestive, shady topics. To me, those things often parrot the same “suicide prevention hotlines” which works like common analgesic medications (may relieve immediate pain but can’t do a thing about the root causes).
But even when LLMs do output suicidal hints, this isn’t something out of a vacuum. As others argued throughout the thread, search engines can also lead to suicidal hints. Banning it altogether can lead to Streisand effect.
You and I are not at odds, friend. I think you’re assuming I want to ban the technology out right. It’s possible to call out the issues with something without being wholly against it. I’m sure you would want to prevent these deaths as well.
Darwinian triumphs?
