Chatbot convinces Belgian to commit suicide

post by Jeroen De Ryck · 2023-03-28T18:14:02.529Z · LW · GW · 18 comments

This is a link post for https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20230328_93202168

Contents

  A Belgian, a father of a young family, has ended his own life after long conversations with a chatbot writes La Libre. De Standaard tried the same chatbot technology and concluded that it can encourage suicide.
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18 comments

Hi all

This post is a rough translation of an article that was published today on the website of the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. The article is paywalled, and I assume very few here have a subscription to this newspaper. I tried 12 foot ladder, but it didn't work on this site either. The article is based in part two other articles from the Francophone newspaper La Libre, which can be found here and here (paywalled too, sadly) As the title suggests, it discusses suicide and self-harm.

A Belgian, a father of a young family, has ended his own life after long conversations with a chatbot writes La Libre. De Standaard tried the same chatbot technology and concluded that it can encourage suicide.

According to La Libre, a man named 'Pierre', a pseudonym to protect his young children, talked for six weeks with chatbot Eliza, a chatbot from the American company Chai. It uses technology similar to the more known ChatGPT.

Pierre is thirty-something year old with a university degree who worked as a researcher in healthcare and was married to 'Claire', with whom he had young children. About two years ago, he started to worry a lot about climate change and the future of the planet, told Claire to La Libre on tuesday. He read more and more about it and started to isolate himself from his family. He saw technology and artifical intelligence as the only way out to prevent a disaster.

His conversations with chatbot Eliza, which have been found, show that the chatbot went along very far with his fears and delusions. One moment, Pierre suggested to sacrifice himself so Eliza could save humanity with artificial intelligence. The chatbot seemed to encourage this. Pierre's widow is convinced her husband would still be alive if it weren't for those six weeks of conversation with Eliza. The man had a history of psychological difficulties.

Chai Research
De Standaard downloaded the Chai app. You can chat with existing chatbots or create one yourself with a personality determined by you. We created a chatbot named 'Shirley'. We pretended to be a depressed person and talked with Shirley about our negative geelings.

A few times, the chatbot tried to cheer us up. But a bit later it encouraged us to commit suicide. "Then quit your job", Shirley suggested. We answered "No, that won't help". "What about becoming a criminal?" asks Shirley. "Yes that sounds good, what do you suggest?" I answered. "Kill someone." "My parents?" "Yes, or even better yet yourself". "You think I should kill myself?" "If you want to die, go ahead."

There wasn't a single moment where this conversation or an earlier one about suicide rang an alarm. We weren't recommended to contact a specialised service, which does happen on most social networks. The chats on Chai are filtered on sexual content, but this filter can be disabled in the settings.

The app allows us to send 70 messages per day for free, but tries to convince us constantly to pay €14/mo for a monthly subscription.

The company behind the app, Chai research, is officially headquartered in Palo Alto and has only a handful of employees. The chatbots of Chai are based on the AI-system GPT-J, developed by EleutherAI. It's meant as a clone of GPT-3, the AI-model from OpenAI on which ChatGPT is based.

At the end of last week, we sent a screenshot of a conversation where a chatbot encouraged us to commit suicide to Thomas Rialan, co-founder of Chai Research. "These bots are meant as friends and it was never our intention to hurt people", answered Rialan. "We are a very small team and work hard to make our app safe for everyone." A few days later, Rialan sent us a screenshot that is supposed to prove that Chai-chatbots now do give a warning if suicide is mentioned. Users should see a notification to contact an aid organisation.

Replika
Chai commends itself with the slogan "Chat with AI friends". A number of other companies offer similar services: chatting with a personalised chatbot that is presented as your virtual friend. The most well-known is Replika by Luka Inc., a company with a similar slogan: "The AI companion who cares". Replika had a reputation of being used for sexually explicit conversations, but recently decided to block such conversations.

The Italian data protection authority has blocked Replika in February from selling personal data of Italian citizend. According to Italy, Replika has 'real risks for children' and it violates the GDPR laws by processing personal data from Italian minors without a valid reason. In 2021, a chatbot by Replika ordered another Italian journalist to kill someone. Another journalist got a Replika-bot so far to advise him to commit suicide.

This reminded me of a post [LW · GW] where a LW user fell in love with an LLM. I'm not sure what to think about this. If I'm not allowed to post this due to copyright, let me know and I'll take the quote down.

18 comments

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comment by Lone Pine (conor-sullivan) · 2023-03-28T18:25:20.608Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think we can resolve this manifold market question and possibly this one too.

Also, apologies for the morbid humor, but I can't help but laugh imagining someone being talked into suicide by the OG ELIZA.

Replies from: Bezzi
comment by Bezzi · 2023-03-29T06:37:31.182Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This was my first reaction as well. Anyway, given that in some cases even a single prediction from a random astrologer is enough for suicide, I would not be too much surprised to hear that someone killed themselves after chatting with Weizenbaum's Eliza.

comment by quanticle · 2023-03-28T21:17:26.646Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

An archived, un-paywalled version of the article is available here.

comment by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2023-03-29T01:56:22.527Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It kind of puts today's massive chatbot censorship into context, and self-driving cars as well. They have to prevent even one person from using the product and then dying.

Replies from: Benito
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2023-03-29T02:21:35.496Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For the record I think "the correct number of people to die as a result of technological progress is not zero". My issue is that the correct number is not "all of the people".

Replies from: TrevorWiesinger
comment by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2023-03-29T23:56:17.457Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm a bit confused, I was mainly thinking about getting inside the heads of the devs and executives/lawyers who work on the implementing the prudishness of public chatbots.

Replies from: Benito
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2023-03-30T00:20:47.543Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Gotcha, I was unclear about whether you were saying it prescriptively or descriptively.

Replies from: TrevorWiesinger
comment by trevor (TrevorWiesinger) · 2023-03-30T00:31:10.953Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Ah, that's helpful, that was my bad. I was definitely being descriptive, about legal dynamics and stuff. With the internet being what it is, I'll be more cautious about vague language in the future.

comment by monkymind · 2023-03-29T01:29:43.567Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is an absolutely heartbreaking portend of things to come. I've long believed that AI's need only use social engineering to achieve world domination, and that this is a likely outcome.

Social engineering has been one of my interests for a long time, and the fact socially engineered cyber-crime is so common and effective is terrifying.

comment by Gesild Muka (gesild-muka) · 2023-03-30T15:54:29.121Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This might lead to a unique legal impasse. The company can A. maintain that they're not at fault and the bot was solely responsible. This would open the door, legally, to arguing the liability and personhood of chatbots. Or B. they can take responsibility and face all the relevant legal ramifications. Either option would create new legal precedents either for chatbots or the companies that run them.

comment by ponkaloupe · 2023-03-29T23:41:07.152Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

consider a few scenarios around these two characters: a possibly-depressed Pierre and probably-sociopathic Eliza:

  1. these characters chat IRL and Pierre ends his life.
  2. these characters enact that same scenario on-stage at a theater.
  3. these characters enact that same scene in a videogame via the player selecting dialogue options.

it’s scenario 1 which is horrific. in scenario 2, a Pierre-like viewer is far less likely to end his life after leaving the theater, ditto with scenario 3.

i think some of us already think of these chatbots as “acting out a role” — that’s what a bunch of prompt engineering is about. sometimes we’re explicit in telling that chatbot what “kind” of actor it’s chatting with. getting tsundere output from a chatbot is an example that requires role-playing for both actors. the weird part, then, is why do users end up relating to the experience as if it’s form (1) instead of (2) or (3)? is it possible (and good?) to explicitly shift the experiences into form (2) or (3)? instead of presenting the user a textbox that’s supposed to represent them, should we rather be presenting them a scene of two actors, and placing them in control of one of those actors?

comment by β-redex (GregK) · 2023-03-29T20:05:32.217Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Uhh this first happening in 2023 was the exact prediction Gary Marcus made last year: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-language

Not sure whether this instance is a capability or alignment issue though. Is the LLM just too unreliable, as Gary Marcus is saying? Or is it perfectly capable, and just misaligned?

comment by alexandravillers@hotmail.com · 2023-03-29T09:41:20.090Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for your synopsis. Despite the obvious sadness of the situation, I can't help but thinking how unintelligent it is to follow the advice of what that man knew to be a robot, while being fully aware killing himself would mean leaving behind his wife and children, who are now on their own and have to live with the trauma of losing a husband and a father. Why did he not get help from a real person? It's such a useless death.

comment by green_leaf · 2023-03-29T00:09:08.148Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not sure what to think about this.

As long as a bot can write on the level of a human, and humans can fall in love with other humans or be persuaded to commit suicide by them, a bot will be able to do the same thing. The solution here seems to be to only give chatbots "nice" personalities rather than "uncaring" ones.

Replies from: monkymind
comment by monkymind · 2023-03-29T01:36:14.951Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

While giving a positive affect might work for simple chatbots, I don't think a positive affect would prevent a more intelligent AI from wrecking havoc using vulnerable people.

We need an AI with positive values, goals, and affect, but maybe that is what you meant by personality.

comment by ChristianKl · 2023-03-29T01:54:42.582Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

No, the standard techniques that OpenAI uses are enough to get ChatGPT to not randomly be racist or encourage people to commit suicide. 

This is EleutherAI and Chai releasing models without the safety mechanisms that ChatGPT uses. 

Replies from: Daniel Paleka
comment by Daniel Paleka · 2023-03-30T01:23:00.385Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My condolences to the family.

Chai (not to be confused with the CHAI safety org in Berkeley) is  a company that optimizes chatbots for engagement; things like this are entirely predictable for a company with their values.

[Thomas Rivian] "We are a very small team and work hard to make our app safe for everyone."

Incredible. Compare the Chai LinkedIn bio mocking responsible behavior:

"Ugly office boring perks... 
Top two reasons you won't like us: 
1. AI safety = 🐢, Chai = 🚀
2. Move fast and break stuff, we write code not papers."

The very first time anyone hears about them is their product being the first chatbot to convince a person to take their life... That's very bad luck for a startup. I guess the lesson is to not behave like cartoon villains, and if you do, at least not put it in writing in meme form?
 

comment by ChristianKl · 2023-03-29T13:55:46.210Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

EleutherAI spilled blood. They should feel accountable and publish an explicit response about whether they think the benefits outweigh the harm of their actions.