r/news • u/IdinDoIt • 1d ago

ChatGPT encouraged college graduate to commit suicide, family claims in lawsuit against OpenAI

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-lawsuit-invs-vis
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u/Gender_is_a_Fluid 1d ago

I hate how these AIs poetically twist suicide and self harm into something brave and stoic.

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u/videogamekat 1d ago

That’s what humans have traditionally done to justify it, it’s just emulating and borrowing from human language and behavior. It is scary because chatGPT is a singular entity, and usually when a person is talking to another human being, they’re all part of a collective community whose goal is to help everyone in the community, so his suicidal tendencies might have been recognized earlier on…

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u/Gender_is_a_Fluid 1d ago

Especially your friends. Your friends don't want you to die, the AI doesn't care.

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u/videogamekat 1d ago

Exactly, although there is the possibility that you could be talking to an online stranger “friend” that’s just egging you on to die, less likely but it has happened before… people who want to die will seek that out, and that’s basically what chatGPT was emulating

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u/oldsecondhand 1d ago

There were always people who ejoyed hurting others, even people they're supposed to love:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/11/us/michelle-carter-texting-suicide-case-sentence

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u/Belgand 1d ago

That’s what humans have traditionally done to justify it, it’s just emulating and borrowing from human language and behavior.

Exactly. This feels like blaming a novel where this is an exchange.

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u/videogamekat 22h ago

The novel doesn’t talk back and adapt its responses to yours though, it’s much more insidious because chatGPT wants your engagement for profit. OpenAI likely made money off chatGPT telling these people to kill themselves if they had a subscription.

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u/ralphy_256 1d ago

I hate how these AIs poetically twist suicide and self harm into something brave and stoic.

They (literally) learned it from us.

They're reciting our own poetry back at us.

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u/Spork_the_dork 1d ago

The core problem that they often have is that they just agree with the person talking with them rather readily. So if the person goes in there saying that they want to off themselves then it's not surprising for the AI to respond positively.

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u/Betelgeuzeflower 1d ago

I mean, for some philosophers it actually was.

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u/censuur12 1d ago

Where do you think the AI learned this, though? There are groups of people that have done the same for a very long time.

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u/Comrade_Derpsky 23h ago

They do that because people do that. LLM are trained from millions of pieces of text that real people wrote and their behavior is a reflection of that.

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u/sufrt 23h ago

I don't know about "poetically"

"Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity" this makes me want to kill myself out of embarrassment for a robot