It’s sad this kid took his life. It’s sad that so many believe OpenAI is the problem. “Fixing” OpenAI isn’t going to lower the suicide rate.
OpenAI didn’t put in the simplest, smallest, easiest protection. (You could do it with a tiny LLM, batch up the conversion on a five minute interval with a cron job.) I could implement it for less than the operations team spends on lunch today. And certainly less than OpenAI will spend bringing their in-house council up to speed on the lawsuit.
Suicide is a crisis and it’s possible to intervene, but only if the confidant tries. In this case it was a machine with insufficient safety controls.
Fixing ChatGPT will 100% lower the suicide rate by exactly the amount of people who confide in ChatGPT about suicidal thoughts and who receive successful intervention. I can’t tell you what that number is ahead of time but I assure it’s nonzero.
Do you even parent bro?
OpenAI has made noise about selling some successor to ChatGPT as a substitute therapist, so some part of their organization believes otherwise.
Also, you should consider cultivating some more empathy for other human beings.
