Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”. The teenager’s family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was “rushed to market … despite clear safety issues”.
The teenager discussed a method of suicide with ChatGPT on several occasions, including shortly before taking his own life. According to the filing in the superior court of the state of California for the county of San Francisco, ChatGPT guided him on whether his method of taking his own life would work.
It also offered to help him write a suicide note to his parents.
There is no “intelligent being” on the other end encouraging suicide.
You enter a prompt, you get a response. It’s a structured search engine at best. And in this case, he was prompting it 600+ times a day.
Now… you could build a case against social media platforms, which actually do send targeted content to their users, even if it’s destructive.
But ChatGPT, as he was using it, really has no fault, intention, or motive.
I’m writing this as someone who really, really hates most AI implementations, and really, really don’t want to blame victims in any tragedy.
But we have to be honest with ourselves here. The parents are looking for someone to blame in their son’s death, and if it wasn’t ChatGPT, maybe it would be music or movies or video games… it’s a coping mechanism.
Agreed that ChatGPT has no motives.
But the thing about these chatbots (as opposed to search engine or library) is that the responses will be in natural language. It won’t just spit out a list of instructions, it will assemble a natural language response that affirms your actions or choices, and sometimes include words that sound empathetic.
I would imagine some of the generated replies would say something to the effect of:
“It’s terribly sad that you’ve committed to ending your own life, but given the circumstances, it’s an understandable course of action. Here are some of the least painful ways to die:…”
Are people looking for something to blame besides themselves? Absolutely. But I think the insidious thing here is that AI companies are absolutely trying to make chatbots a replacement for human connection.
We don’t know what kind of replies this teen was getting, but according to reports, he was only getting this information under the context that it would be for some kind of creative writing or “world-building”, thus bypassing the guardrails that were in place.
It would be hard to imagine a reply like that, when the chatbot’s only context is to provide creative writing ideas based on the user’s prompts.