Assuming you’re referring to this story, that’s a stretch: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-la...
“His stepfather’s .45 caliber handgun” being unlocked and available to him seems like the proximate cause.
Have you heard the one about suicide in the UK reducing when they switched to non-toxic cooking gas? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC478945/pdf/brjprevs...
Not hard to propose that difficulty of killing / dying does decrease likelihood of killing / dying. Lock up your guns.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK374099/#:~:text=We%20h...
That said, stuff like this definitely makes me think there's a lot of people on the margin who would be affected by what a chatbot says. Even a much older model like ELIZA.
Yeah, that's the problem. Tech bros high on the AI kool-aid think the problem is not the chatbot driving him to suicide but having access to a gun.
Though in this case, I'd point fingers at "American culture" rather than "tech bros":
As the Onion says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
Guns are pretty much irrelevant to the story, that's my point
The focus of the story is an AI chatbot murdering a human
Well, that's not the right words, we do not even have the right words for this because murder presumes intent and obviously there's no intent
An automated plagiarism machine has spewed such bullshit which pushed a teen to suicide. Perhaps that's the right wording.
Easy access to firearms is totally in the same category as easy access to painkillers to overdose on, and has been demonstrated by similar research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4566524/#:~:text=Fi....
I have opined before that I would be surprised if ChatGPT specifically has caused the deaths of fewer than 200 people, just by giving bad advice — that's one in a million of the users, and I think that's plausible given the story of a different chatbot almost leading to botulism poisoning.
I also think that the general internet should have an 18 rating: to the extent that the argument for film classifications is valid, and that the internet is too big to be classified and also definitely contains examples of things beyond the most extreme allowed in cinema etc., we should treat it like it's 18-only content except where demonstrably suitable for younger audiences.