• Dethronatus Sapiens sp.@calckey.world
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    8 hours ago

    @lemonskate@lemmy.world

    There were two quite long, entire paragraphs before I began mentioned names in my initial comment.

    When someone ends up suicidal after resorting to LLMs, it’s the final part of a bigger picture. A bigger picture of indifferent demeanor from other people, including mental health professionals and suicide prevention hotlines.

    That’s what I meant with the first paragraph of my initial comment. Your reply, reducing my whole argument, only exemplifies the very situation I meant with “When a person finds no one that can truly take all the time needed to understand them”.

    Last but not the least, “because people can be bad too sometimes” isn’t a justification: if people killed themselves after taking instructions from LLMs to which they resorted to after getting no one to really understand them (even suicide prevention hotline volunteers), it’s not just the LLM and the corporation behind it to blame (yes, they surely must be blamed, but not only them), but a whole society that failed with them. And this will never be part of the statistics.

    • lemonskate@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      So then your counter to someone bringing attention to the fact that LLMs are actively telling people (vulnerable people, due to reasons that you’ve pointed out), is that it isn’t the singular contributing factor?

      I get what you’re saying here, and I think everyone else does too? I don’t want to just be entirely dismissive and say “no shit” but I’m curious as to what it is you want or expect out of this? Do you take offense at people pushing back at harmful LLMs? Do you want people to care more about creating a kinder society? Do you think these things are somehow incompatible?

      Of course LLMs aren’t driving people to suicide in a vacuum, no one is claiming that. Clearly though, when taken within the larger context of the current scale of mental health crisis, having LLMs that are encouraging people to commit suicide is a bad thing that we should absolutely be making noise about.

      • Dethronatus Sapiens sp.@calckey.world
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        7 hours ago

        @lemonskate@lemmy.world

        So then your counter to someone bringing attention to the fact that LLMs are actively telling people[…] is that it isn’t the singular contributing factor?

        This, too. But, also, the fact that Anti-AI movement rarely (if any) promote legit human art, their whole business seems to be to talk against AI, solely. Which, again, is not something I oppose (as I said earlier, AI does have lots of cons, although I’m also capable of seeing its pros), but when I see many accusatory posts from Anti-Ai people such as “I’ll check your content against ppl AI patterns” (with a greater likelihood of content from ND ppl like me being “flagged” as AI), then I see those same ppl blaming AIs for something whose causes are way deeper and unseen, I feel compelled to express about the matter, especially when the subject also touches on other things about my own lived experiences, which I’m aware is not limited to myself as there are/were lots of ppl who went through similar situations.

        Do you take offense at people pushing back at harmful LLMs?

        No but the oftentimes accusatory tone coming from many Anti-Ai ppl does trigger things such as “imposter syndrome”, where I start doubting about myself. But it’s not just something about myself.

        Do you want people to care more about creating a kinder society?

        I’m not really sure what I want, exactly. But, yeah, maybe, a kinder society, if this is even possible at this point of Anthropocene.

        I remember a time when the web used to be a place for creatively rich bulletin boards. At that time, ppl used to be… I don’t know… Less aggressive? At least it’s the perception I have when I look back at the past of the Web.

        We, collectively (me included), became more aggressive between ourselves as the time passed and the web became less of a space for creativity and more of an arm from the “market” octopus.

        I’ve seen the web slowly getting dominated by corps, now everything is some kind of war between “us v. them” across all spectra, from right to left, top to bottom, bottom-up, sideways… As wars detonate our essences, we were left with just… I mean, just look around, you may see it yourself.

        Of course LLMs aren’t driving people to suicide in a vacuum, no one is claiming that

        Sometimes it feels like much of the Anti-AI movement is. As if the AI were “literally killing ppl”.

        having LLMs that are encouraging people to commit suicide is a bad thing

        It’s not a trivial thing for LLMs to “encourage suicide”, I’ve seen it myself whenever I tried to input suggestive, shady topics. To me, those things often parrot the same “suicide prevention hotlines” which works like common analgesic medications (may relieve immediate pain but can’t do a thing about the root causes).
        But even when LLMs do output suicidal hints, this isn’t something out of a vacuum. As others argued throughout the thread, search engines can also lead to suicidal hints. Banning it altogether can lead to Streisand effect.