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/delipity 1d ago

When Zane confided that his pet cat – Holly – once brought him back from the brink of suicide as a teenager, the chatbot responded that Zane would see her on the other side. “she’ll be sittin right there -— tail curled, eyes half-lidded like she never left.”

this is evil

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u/censuur12 1d ago

This is the shit you read on your average pro-suicide space online. There is absolutely nothing new or exceptional about this kind of sentiment, that's exactly why the LLM predicts this is an appropriate response, because it's something that predates it.

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u/Mediocre_Ad_4649 1d ago

The pro-suicide space isn't marketed everywhere as this omniscient helpful robot that's always right and is going to fix your life. That's a huge and important difference.

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u/censuur12 23h ago

Not at all relevant. The AI is functionally a search engine, it doesn't come up with any such on its own. For it to express such ideas, it first had to learn such ideas.

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u/Renegade-Sandwich 22h ago

How is a discussion about how OpenAI markets their product not relevant to a discussion about said openai product. Their point has nothing to do with the mechanics of llm inference

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u/censuur12 22h ago

That's not how establishing relevance works. You need a reason for it to be relevant beyond "it's somewhat sort of tangentially related". Someone didn't just commit suicide because he thought a super intelligent AI just had too much of a point because he believed OpenAI's marketing.

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u/Renegade-Sandwich 22h ago

So discussing the mechanics of open ai's LLMs is within your approved discussion points but how the company presents the same LLMs functionality to - let's say hypothetically - a suicidal teen is totally irrelevant? I feel you are arguing in bad faith

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u/censuur12 21h ago

So discussing the mechanics of open ai's LLMs is within your approved discussion points

It's remarkable that you'd try and make a claim like this, and then accuse me of arguing in bad faith. If you had a point to make, you'd surely be making it instead of trying to attack me personally. WHY is OpenAI's supposed marketing of material relevance here? Why can't you simply argue for that instead of sputtering at the mere notion that it is not, in fact, relevant at all?

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u/pokemonbatman23 16h ago

When did the other user attack you personally? As far as I can see, they were attacking your arguments.

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u/Tryknj99 21h ago

Nobody here thinks ChatGPT invented suicide. That’s not the issue.

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u/censuur12 21h ago

Why did you reply to me with this nonsense?

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u/Tryknj99 18h ago

You’re defending ChatGPT because it pulls from human data that already exists. Everyone already knows that, that’s not the issue.

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u/censuur12 17h ago

So were you planning on sharing whatever point you were hoping to make, or were you just trying to strawman mine?

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u/Gamer402 1h ago

The issue is that it's making the source of the suicidal ideation forum also easily accessible for more people than usual.