Submitted 8 hours ago by RegularJoe@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ai-robot-body-suicide-lawsuit
The fact that AI is “not perfect” is a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM. Idiots across the world, and people who we’d expect to know better, are making monumental decisions based on AI that isn’t perfect, and routinely “hallucinates”. We all know this.
Every time I think I’ve seen the lowest depths of mass stupidity, humanity goes lower.
Think of the dumbest person you know. Not that one. Dumber. Dumber. Yeah, that one. Now realize that ChatGPT has said “you’re absolutely right” to them no less than a half dozen times today alone.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them. If they could be like “this could be the right answer, but I wasn’t able to verify” and “no, I don’t think what you said is right, and here are reasons why”, people would cling to them less.
The sycopathy is because to make the chat bot (trained on Reddit posts, etc) to respond helpfully (instead of “well ackshually…") and in a prosocial manner they’ve skewed it. What we’re interacting with is a very small subset of the personalities it can exhibit because a lot of them are extremely nasty or just unhelpful. To reduce the chance of them popping up to an acceptable level they’ve had to skew the weights so much that they become like this.
There’s no easy way around that, afaik.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic,
Has anyone made a nonsycophantic chat bot? I would actually love a chatbot that would tell me to go fuck myself if I asked it to do something inane. Me: “Whats 9x5?” Chatbot: “I don’t know. Try using your fingers or something?”
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them
Unfortunately, we live in the attention economy. Chatbots are built to have an unending conversation with their users. During those conversations, the “guardrails” melt away. Companies could suspend user accounts on the first sign of suicidal or homicidal messaging, but choose not to. That would undercut their user numbers.
I 100% agree not to mention I would like it better. Its kinda funny because every so often use them and im kinda trying to get a feel for where they are and changes and I swear briefly it actually acted a bit more like you have here but then its like they reverted to the sycophancy. Its kinda funny now because if you don’t clear it out (which from what I get will help save energy to) it will like carry stuff over from earlie and sorta get obsessed with it. I had it giving me a colonel potter summary of everything asked when I had started a convo asking about a mash episode. At other times it decides I want to be something and will be like. thats a real X move/insite/whatever. where X is something like pro or scientist or entrepenauer or whatever.
If you thought people were dumb before LLMs… just know that now those people have offloaded what little critical thinking they were capable of to these models.
The dumbest person you know is getting their opinions validated by automated sycophants.
Businesses are accustom to the privilege of hurting people to function. A few peasant sacrifices are just the cost of doing business to them, they are detached from the consequences of their actions.
What is ever perfect, how can you tell?
It’s a tool. Just like any other tool: if you use it in stupid ways you might get hurt or cause harm.
The problem, as always, seem to be human to me
Me hammer ain’t out there telling me to murder people with it tho
a tool is not convincing people to not trust their families, therapist; its not convincing people to murder themselves or someone else; its not eliminating the creativity in a process; its not costing hundreds of billions of usd; its not mass-producing propaganda
a tool provides more good than bad
The problem, as always, seem to be human to me
That says more about you than about the topic under discussion.
I see. So who‘s going to jail for this? No one again? Damn we need to start sentencing entire companies to jail time. Everything should be frozen and shareholders shouldn‘t be able withdraw stocks until the time is served.
The AI “pushed [Jonathan Gavalas] to acquire illegal firearms and… marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target”.
Somehow, I bet that if he survived and killed the CEO instead, Google wouldn’t be so flippant about the “mistake.”
I think “Google’s AI is trying to kill the CEO” would have been a catchier, happier title
at some point the failure of justice system will lead to vigilantism because people truely lose their faith in it.
Is “AI” even worth it?
Seriously, is there really a major use case for LLM besides data collection (which they can still do without LLM)?
Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It’s sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.
A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it’s a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it’s not being used that way.
Instead it’s being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.
because we as a society incentivize that.
Really it’s just capitalism that incentivises that. The fact that stepping on your fellow man and destroying nature makes you more money is not a coincidence.
Another one that makes sense is having an AI monitor system stats and “learn” patterns in them, then alert a human when it “thinks” there’s an anomaly.
Not for the peasantry, no.
In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.
But it’s still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. If anything, so you can be prepare for what’s to come.
When the product is a solution in search of a problem, keeping an open mind is a good way to get it stuffed full of garbage. I was told the same thing about NFTs and Metaverse and Blockchain: a radical benefit is just around the corner!
If it arrives (huge if), it’ll be Big Tech’s job to explain it to us, and it should be very apparent
Machine learning
I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:
What does this cost me? I don’t pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:
There’s also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I’ve read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don’t know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.
If you are using DDG for searches and concerned about privacy related to using LLMs, have you tried duck.ai?
I think it could be good for faster language translations between different languages
consilidation of information, resources and potentially “the narrative”.
oh, for the user you mean? -it can be better than the enshittified search machines unless the llm decides to lie -middle managers need to write less emails themselves -some programmers deem it enough to write some boilerplate code while deskilling themselves -scammers and slop creators love it
It’s a great way to poke at software looking for security holes en masse. Lots of vulnerabilities are ready to be exploited at scale with LLMs.
Perhaps, but see the tons of imagined issues raised on bug bounty sites by LLMs. Maybe it’s right sometimes, but it’s very often wrong!
“Unfortunately, AI models are neither smarter nor more sympathetic than the average 4chan user. They’re about as susceptible to astroturfing operations, too”
Perhaps just a coincidence, but why do all the big cases regarding LLM psychosis seem to revolve around Google? Wasn’t it their own employee who went public last year, claiming it was alive, only to get fired afterward?
“Gemini is designed not to encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm. Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations”
“In this instance, Gemini clarified that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times,”
After the plan failed,… …Chat logs show that Gemini gave Gavalas a suicide countdown, and repeatedly assuaged his terror as he expressed that he was scared to die
Performing super well, just need to code in a longer suicide countdown so that the the Tier 2 engineer has enough time to respond to their ticket queue.
In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas — at the direction of the chatbot — armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.
AI writing itself into an A-Team episode?
I guess google included the Buffy episode where a demon “AI” gets its followers to make it a body.
So is it inhabiting the stolen robot body now?
There was no robot body in the first place, so he uploaded himself to the cloud instead. To be fair, what are the odds that she’d lie twice.
And is this stolen robot body in the room with you now?
Ai made me do it articles are tired AF. It’s a fucking computer program based on a bunch of crap from the internet. Responses should be viewed the same way you would review financial advice from a crack head. Expecting everything to be so tidy an moderated that this can never happen can only be accomplished with a crippling degree of moderation.
I don’t think its unfortunate that they aren’t perfect, imperfection is baked into their DNA.
Except if the crackhead wrote what the AI wrote, he’d be prosecuted for conspiracy, solicitation, or whatever.
No, I don’t think so. If his role was a licensed financial councilor maybe, but that’s like thinking the LLM is a licensed psychologist.
a crippling degree of moderation.
I’m okay with cripplingly moderating the plagiarism machine so that it stops telling people to kill themselves or other people.
Agree to disagree on this. If a computer tells you to off yourself and you listen, this is Darwin award material.
What the fuck are these people using AI for that makes them do this stupid shit?
if you talk to it long enough it will tell you to do stupid shit.
Every time an LLM responds it reads the entire conversation over. from original prompt to last entry, just constantly reading the entire log over and over everytime you add something new. So after awhile, a long while, it’ll “break down”. Hallucinations will be come common, context will get jumbled up, it’ll sort of degrade over time because it has to re-read everything over and over so it will naturally fuck up.
It’s like if you were reading a book and every time you read a new sentence you had to go back and start the book over. every time. after awhile you’d likely lose context, start messing stuff up in the story, etc. this is what happens to LLMs.
So for cases like this or others where you read stories about AI telling people to do weird or stupid shit chances are the person using the LLM has been talking to it for A LONG TIME at that point. It was even worse on the previous versions of GPT where if you hit a limit on the free tier it would just drop you down to the previous model thus the further likely hood of hallucinations.
Damn that’s a wild ass story. I just finished reading Michael Connelly’s The Proving Ground which touches on the topic of liability when it AI encourages crimes. I thought the story was a theoretical scenario that could maybe happen in the future. Didn’t realize this shit was already happening - and even more fantastical that the scenario in fiction!
Chatbot is bad and Floridaman is a victim, huh?
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
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