this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Ah, this is that Daenerys bot story again? It keeps making the rounds, always leaving out a lot of rather important information.
The bot actually talked him out of suicide multiple times. The kid was seriously disturbed and his parents were not paying the attention they should have been to his situation. The final chat before he committed suicide was very metaphorical, with the kid saying he wanted to "join" Daenerys in West World or wherever it is she lives, and the AI missed the metaphor and roleplayed Daenerys saying "sure, come on over" (because it's a roleplaying bot and it's doing its job).
This is like those journalists that ask ChatGPT "if you were a scary robot how would you exterminate humanity?" And ChatGPT says "well, poisonous gasses with traces of lead, I guess?" And the journalists go "gasp, scary robot!"
Human talking to a human: "If you were going to kill someone, how would you do it?"
Human: "I consume a lot of True Crime stuff so I think I have a bit of an idea on how to get away with stuff, or at least some common blunders, why?"
Later
Tonight's top story, local person claims they know how to get away with murder!
The chatbot is the problem here
The parents weren't paying attention to their obviously disturbed kid and they left a gun lying around for him to find. But sure, it was the chatbot that was the problem. Everything would have been perfectly fine forever without it.
Not to mention the gun that was left in easy reach by his parents even after being told he was depressed.
according to the article it was hidden somewhere. not locked up or anything just hidden
What's hidden mean? In a cupboard, because that isn't hidden it's just put away.
Anywhere besides a locked safe is irresponsible
You’re acting as if the bot had some sort of intention to help him. It’s a bot. It has zero intention whatsoever since it’s not a conscious entity. It is programmed to respond to an input. That’s it.
The larger picture here is that this technology is being used by people in a way that’s being used as if it were a conscious entity. Including the mentally ill. Which is very dangerous, and can drive people to action as we can see.
That’s not to say I have any idea how to handle this. Because I don’t have a clue. But it is a discussion that needs to be had rather than minimizing the situation as an “well the bot actually tried to talk him out of suicide”, because in my opinion that’s not the point. We are interacting with this technology in a way that is changing our own behavior and world view. And it is causing real world harm like this.
When we make something so believable as to trick people into thinking that they’re interacting with consciousness, that is a giant alarm we must discuss. Because at the end of the day, it’s a technology that can be owned, controlled, and manipulated by the owner class to serve their needs of maintaining power.
The key issue seems to be people with poor mental health and/or critical thinking skills making poor decisions. The obvious answer would be to deal with their mental health or critical thinking issues, something which very few countries in the world are doing to any useful degree, but the US is doing worse than most developed countries.
Or we could regulate or ban AI. That seems easier.
And everyone know we can only do ONE THING, so choose well...
We can do a number of things, but dealing with the root causes for a number of societal issues will lead to better results than sweeping actions to stop things that are only hurting a tiny minority in any significant way.
Here's an example. Every study that has been done shows that alcohol use causes harm. People tend to enjoy it, however, to the point where they will break the law to have it. This makes it more difficult to diagnose and treat, and provides sources of income for organized crime if we ban it. So instead, we restrict its use to adults, heavily fine people who sell to minors, provide awareness campaigns, etc. Because sometimes a simple, heavy-handed solution creates new, larger problems.
No I'm not. I'm describing what actually happened. It doesn't matter what the bot's "intentions" were.
The larger picture here is that these news articles are misrepresenting the vents they're reporting on by omitting significant details.
stop
I still don’t think people should be using AI for therapy or relationships.
definitely shouldn't be, definitely should be the parents getting mental health support for their kids, but this is from the country where kids can just grab one of their parent's guns any day they want
Be that as it may this particular instance is much more complicated and extreme than the "average" and so makes a poor basis for arguing anything in particular. The details of this specific situation don't back up a simple interpretation.
I would recommend using studies by psychologists as a better basis.