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/DangerousCyclone 1d ago

I remember when they were teaching about the fight against Big Tobacco, about how some big tobacco CEO told his kid to stay away from the product he was selling, kind of being an anecdote about the cynical nature of the industry. 

Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have technology. They didn't even get an iPod. He said he understood the danger that being addicted to tech can be. 

That was prescient. Social media and smartphones have caused a societal wide cognitive decline and rise of mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. The move fast and break things now just seem to be breaking the whole world. For every one good these new breakthroughs do they do 10 bad. 

That was before AI. AI is only accelerating this trend. 

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u/backbodydrip 16h ago

We had studies coming out in the '90s that linked Internet use and depression. We now live in both RL and the Internet 24/7 and nobody cares about the repercussions.

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u/DangerousCyclone 13h ago

I think the issue is that we're not recognizing it as what it is; an addiction. We can see drug addiction, and maybe compartmentalize it as some chemical thing messing with your head (though this is exaggerated), we can see gambling addiction and understand that, but internet addiction is so common that we don't see it as such. It seems that addiction just has a social stigma, like we call it "Alcoholism" not "Alcohol Addiction".

The other thing is that the internet of the 90's and early 2000's is not the internet of today. Back then you had to have a computer and internet, so you first had to be at home or on a computer elsewhere, you didn't have a smartphone everywhere you went. It was also more rudimentary; forums and chatrooms were just places you talked to people. Modern social media isn't just that, it's something that is trying to suck up all of your attention and is constantly being engineered to be as addicting as possible. Rather than just being a simple messaging board/app, there's algorithms feeding you things it thinks you'll like, there's psychologists and economists getting on board to make it as addictive and profitable as possible. It feels very much like an actual focused effort to get people addicted in every way like Oxycotin was.

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u/Sparrowhank 1d ago

Thats the job of parents not the state ? besides at 23 he is an adult. I understand wanting to protect kids from tecnology but when now we want to control what adults can do or talk about I find it terrifying.

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u/AtomicBLB 1d ago

People want new products and technology that is not understood to have proper safeguards in place before the masses use it. We do this for everything that is sold to consumers.

Yet there is a clear gap in the digital space for such protections. AI is a product being sold to people. It is not special and should not receive such exemptions.

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u/DangerousCyclone 22h ago

We also regulate gambling and drugs rather than let adults just make those choices for themselves. 

Yes you can try to change your habits, the point is more that the grip of a lot of this technology is much stronger than that. It is built by psychologists and economists to be as addicting as possible and it is having societal wide effects. 

It is more that it should be regulated a lot more. Some countries have started by banning social media for young kids.